Leslye Headland Explains How Relationship With Her Late Father Influenced ‘The Acolyte’: “Of course I’m going to lean toward the other side, the dark side”

‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’ is the most recent installment in the Star Wars franchise. The show ran for 8 episodes before being canceled a couple of days ago, mostly due to being too expensive, overwhelmingly negative feedback, and overall lack of viewers.

One of the most criticized aspects of the show was the fact that it subverted the expectations when it came to protagonists and portrayed the Jedi in a bad light. If you’ve followed the show closely, you are likely familiar with the fact that the show’s protagonist Osha ultimately does not resist the dark side, and after killing her father figure and her former Jedi Master, she joined Qimir, newly introduced Sith Lord.

It’s that relationship between Osha and Jedi Master Sol that’s been in part influenced by Headland’s personal life. The showrunner explained in an interview with Vulture how she originally wanted to explore the relationship between the two sisters, but due to some tragic events in her life she decided to explore the relationship between “daughter” and “father,” once again drawing parallels between Luke and Darth Vader:

The image of Luke slaying Vader in the Dagobah cave and then seeing his own face in the helmet really stuck with me from childhood. It was a talisman I would always touch, like, This is what it’s about. What if I’m the bad guy? Do I feel like the bad guy, but I’m not? Am I being villainized by the people I love most? Or is this thing already in me and the otherness, the thing I’m afraid of, what I should embrace about myself?

I started out wanting to explore the sister relationship , then my father got very sick in the middle of developing this and it turned into this father-daughter relationship. My dad died in September. As we moved forward with the story, I got sucked into my own feelings about his illness and our history together. Kathleen said, “George wrote about his father. You need to write about your sister. You need to write about your father.” Luke felt betrayed by his father in the way that George didn’t want to take over his father’s hardware store. My father made so many promises to me, and I felt like I failed because I couldn’t live up to those expectations. Of course I’m going to lean toward the other side, the dark side, the otherness. That system has its own societal expectations, but I’m more comfortable there than when I was trying to live up to what you wanted for me.

When you have the type of father Sol is, there’s an inability to recognize that paternalism as insular. Osha has to destroy her father to keep moving. I don’t know what it means, but for father-son relationships in Star Wars, there’s reconciliation. For father-daughter, there isn’t.

The relationship between the two sisters in the show was also partially based on Headland’s own experiences as she revealed that she is estranged from her youngest sister.

The showrunner also commented how Osha had to kill Sol due to “benign sexism” as that’s the only path toward agency for the character and to break from the expectations placed upon her by her father figure.

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