Amandla Stenberg has spoken about the final scenes of episode 8 of The Acolyte where her character Osha shares a tender moment with The Stranger.
There’s that scene at the very end where the Stranger puts his hand on Osha’s hand and the lightsaber. I know you, Manny, and Leslye kind of worked it out together while filming. Tell me how that scene came together.
That was Manny’s idea. We pitched a lot of different things, and now we’re getting tons of shippers, of course, on Twitter and Tumblr and people who are now calling it Oshamir. And they really wanted to see some romantic arc take place with Qimir and Osha, which totally get it. And that was the original vision.
But as we arrived to that point in filming, again, we returned to Osha’s choices and this sense of it feeling autonomous, and we just came to the decision that we didn’t feel like a romantic resolution was quite earned yet. And we also wanted Osha’s journey to be autonomous from that arc. And so we decided, “Okay, you know what? Let’s table it for now.”
We also just felt like there was a lot of weight and significance in the political alignment that’s happening between those two characters, and Osha internally reaching this place that Qimir has been pushing her towards. We wanted to keep the focus on that, and we were like, “What’s some sort of symbol that we can utilize that connotes a political alignment between them and this union?” But also there’s a lot of intimacy in that sort of shared vision and power, and Manny came up with instead of holding hands, they’re going to hold the lightsaber together, which we just thought was awesome.
He would pitch things like that all the time. Whenever there is intimacy or physical representations of their intimacy, a lot of it was Manny’s idea, and we just leaned in.
What’s also intriguing about it is we’ve never seen a fully dark side romance before on screen.
Yeah, totally. And I think that’s just also Leslye’s sensibilities. [Laughs] Leslye is a Sith and I’m a Scorpio, and so I think that appeals to both of us. Also, because of where we exist in the timeline, it makes it more interesting to explore that kind of intimate connection because the Sith exists in the underbelly of the universe, and so they are not the dominating forces of the universe at that point, which I think is kind of more fodder for what is an underdog relationship like at this point in the timeline.
Read the full interview with Amandla here, and stream The Acolyte on Disney+ now.
