Leslye Headland Comments on What She Was Able to “Get away with” in ‘The Acolyte’: “I just figured someone would stop me”

‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’ recently released its 5th episode, we’re officially more than halfway through the show, and things are finally picking up pace. Plenty of shocking things happened in the latest episode. First, two major characters have been killed Yord and Jecki Lon. They were ruthlessly eliminated by Qimir – who turned out to be The Stranger aka Sith Lord master of Mae.

We also learned that Mae & Osha switched places, with Mae going to Coruscant to Master Sol and Osha being picked up by Qimir.

Although we theorized that the show might eliminate all the Jedi present on the planet to hide the mystery of the new Sith Lord, this ultimately did take place. The show sacrificed two major characters and a bunch of red shirts, marking the most significant Jedi culling since ‘The Revenge of the Sith.’

The cast and crew were shocked by this turn of events, calling Headland jokingly a masochist, and Headland herself commented that she was surprised what she was able to get away with within the family-friendly franchise:

I just figured someone would stop me and nobody did. I figured someone would say, ‘This is too far!’ But they didn’t. […] I guess I always thought, ‘Well, Anakin killed a bunch of children, so…'”

Dafne Keen, however, whose character was on the chopping block praised Headland’s bold direction:

There are so many directors in blockbuster sagas that are so scared to kill off their characters, and are so comfortable with bringing characters back to life, and all of these little writer tricks that I think are quite cheeky. And I really like that she was actually killing people. Because if you’re not making it dangerous, then why are we even here? Why are we concerned by the story? Why do we care? Leslye has such a backbone as a writer, to make you fall in love with these characters and then slaughter them all like pigs and be like, ‘Yeah, this is our villain. We’re not just saying he’s so big and scary, we’re actually showing you how big and scary he is.

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