Leslye Headland Explains Shocking Death in the Opening Sequence of ‘The Acolyte’: “You Have to Go Hard”

‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’ recently premiered with the first two episodes. The show received mixed reviews primarily due to critics praising it and fans blasting it, not liking the “inclusive” tone of the show.

Despite all the controversy surrounding it, the show managed to have the biggest premiere on Disney+ this year being streamed 4.8 million times on the first day of streaming.

The first two episodes showed us very little reasons why we should care about its characters and premise, but it does have some impressive fight scenes. In one of the first scenes, a fight breaks out between Amandla Stenberg’s Mae and Carrie-Anne Moss’ Master Indara.

Despite being a huge part of the marketing campaign and hyping up the show, Indara dies within the first few minutes of the show, which triggers a galaxy-wide hunt to locate and neutralize the most recent threat to the Jedi order.

Fans were shocked and disappointed expecting more from Indara, in her recent interview with Gamesradar, the creator of the show Leslye Headland explained why this scene had to happen the way it happened:

From a filmmaker perspective, I just felt like with the cold open, especially with a new story, that you just have to go hard. You have to say the Jedi are going to take some Ls; you’re not going to know who the good guys and the bad guys are. And it’s going to feel very visceral. […] Even if you already know it’s going to happen, it doesn’t have to be a big gotcha moment. It just has to be a moment where the emotional and the physical – meaning the fights – melt together. Carrie-Anne, not just being an action legend, is also a phenomenal actress. She was able to play all those beats within the fight as well as, of course, her death scene.

I get that it had to be a relatively famous action star that dies to prove a point, on how much of a danger Mae really is, but honestly, in my opinion, the scene did nothing to create an emotional response in me or a sense of urgency, if anything the first thing that fell to my mind was “what a waste of a budget.”

What do you think? Was that scene necessary? Let us know in the comments below!

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