'Star Wars: The Acolyte': How Amandla Stenberg convincingly played twins in new series
"Magic is born on sets when people feel freedom to be their authentic selves, and feel supported as artists," Stenberg said
From Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap to Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers, Amandla Stenberg is joining TV and movie history for playing twins in the new Star Wars series The Acolyte on Disney+. Stenberg takes on the roles of Mae and Osha, starring alongside Carrie-Anne Moss, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lee Jung-jae, Charlie Barnett and Manny Jacinto.
"I think about shapes and sensibilities," Stenberg told Yahoo Canada about her approach to the characters. "I think about the character's internal world and then I think about what I believe that will look like on the outside."
"When I looked at Osha, I felt that she was a very methodical person. I also felt a lot of warmth and sarcasm from her on the page, and I noticed that the things that she connected to were very tactile things that she could touch and see, technology and those kinds of things. So that made me think of her as sort of as a square."
Watch The Acolyte on Disney+ with plans starting at $7.99/month
The actor went on to say that she felt she had more "leeway" with Mae.
"Mostly, at the beginning of the show at least, [there were action sequences] written on the page," Stenberg explained. "So that gave me a lot of leeway and I felt like I wanted the characters to be incredibly different from each other."
"Also, because in many ways they are representative of the balance of The Force, and so I thought about the elements that were the opposite of Osha. And I thought that this quality of sort of intuition and femininity would make more sense for her. And so I tried to kind of split different parts of myself into two people."
What is 'The Acolyte' about?
From creator Leslye Headland (Russian Doll), much of The Acolyte is an exploration of good and evil in a Jedi tale set near the end of the High Republic era, only previously featured in books and comics, 100 years before the rise of The Empire.
"I feel like that's kind of the existential question at the end of the day, what parts of ourselves are good? What parts of them are inherently bad? And I think they're always a flux," Stenberg said about exploring light and dark, and the grey in between, in The Acolyte. "That's just kind of the nature of being a person."
Osha and Mae are twins that ended up on different sides of The Force. After the murder of a powerful Jedi, Osha gets pulled into a search for her twin sister with Master Jedi Sol (Lee Jung-jae).
Jacinto as Qimir is someone we're not entirely sure we can trust, a drifter who seems really compelled help Mae, but we're not sure what his intentions are when we meet him.
'A lot of Qimir's own survival lies within Mae and having to appease her master'
In terms of establishing that relationship between Qimir and Osha, and Qimir and Mae, Canadian actor Jacinto highlighted that there was an opportunity to play with more "comedic" moments in the series.
"At least [through the later half] of the second episode, ... when he interacts with Osha for the first time, we were really able to lean into the awkwardness of the situation, to bring more of a comedic scene, and that informed me a lot," Jacinto said.
"Then on the other side of that with Mae, it was very much a brother-sister relationship in terms of not liking each other, but needing each other to survive. I think a lot of Qimir's own survival lies within Mae and having to appease her master."
Stenberg added that she did a lot of work with Jacinto in pre-production, including both just coming to terms with the fact that they were shooting a Star Wars project.
"Thankfully we had time to hang out and kind of wrap our heads around the fact that we were doing Star Wars," Stenberg said. "A lot of that additional time together was like, 'Hey, do you want to watch a movie? I can't believe we're doing Star Wars. I'm very scared.'"
'Magic is born on sets when people feel freedom to be their authentic selves'
Something The Acolyte stars really enjoyed about working with Headland, but weren't expecting on a series that's part of such a huge franchise, was the amount of collaboration and input they were able to provide.
"When you come into a huge franchise like this you don't expect to actually collaborate," Jacinto said. "You kind of just expect to show up and say your lines, and walk to mark, but we had rehearsals, we were able to craft scenes together. She very much appreciated our opinion."
"There was one point where we were rehearsing and then Leslye was like, 'And then your character would do this,' and she was pointing at me. And then I was like, oh you actually want me to say something or come up with something. I felt pressure, but also absolute joy that she would let me create with her."
Watch The Acolyte on Disney+ with plans starting at $7.99/month
"Leslye comes from a theatre background, she's a playwright, and so she has this wonderful attitude of workshopping something, collaborating with it, and focusing on the core tenants of it, and then allowing everything else around it to be influenced by the people she chooses to bring into the process," Stenberg added.
"The way she works just has a lot of integrity and heart and I always appreciate that so deeply in a director, when they're open and receptive to the people around them. ... Ultimately, they chose them for a reason and I think that magic is born on sets when people feel freedom to be their authentic selves, and feel supported as artists."
