BEWARE OF SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 5 OF THE ACOLYTE BELOW!
The latest chapter of The Acolyte has dropped, and with it came a shocking bloodbath as well as the reveal of who’s wearing The Stranger mask, showrunner Leslye Headland and the cast breakdown the fifth episode’s details.
Manny Jacinto has been keeping a big secret. But there’s just one problem: “I’m the worst liar,” he says in between sips of an almost comically oversized water bottle. However, the time has finally arrived for Jacinto to come clean, and the sudden explosion of truth-telling is positively intoxicating, no matter what is actually in that bottle.
“I’ve been lying to people for the last two years — to their faces,” he confesses. “Some of them, they straight up call me out and they’re like, ‘I don’t trust what you’re saying.’ Some of them believe me. But I’ve been lying, and it gives me a lot of anxiety, having to lie to people.”
The root of the aforementioned deception and cause of Jacinto’s pants being constantly on fire for the past two years centers around his true role on Disney+’s The Acolyte. But the June 25 episode has freed the actor up to finally embrace something his character certainly has not: pure honesty.
“I mean, right now I’m tingling,” he says, smiling. “Just because this is the first time that I’m actually able to talk about it.”
Talk about what? The fact that his previously established part of shady apothecary Qimir was all a ruse and that he is actually a Sith Lord known only as the Stranger? That the dude just brutally murdered multiple Jedi, including a Force-using Wookiee and two other main characters in a deadly blur of ultraviolence? That his hair could still look so on point even after wearing a creepy helmet straight out of a horror movie?
Because fans are talking about all that and more after feasting their eyes on the biggest action spectacular in streaming Star Wars history. Clocking in at 32 minutes, episode 5 of The Acolyte was the series’ own Fury Road: essentially one nonstop fight scene from beginning to end. During the melee, the mysterious, red-blade-wielding master of Jedi assassin Mae (Amandla Stenberg) was finally unmasked as Jacinto’s Qimir — an unmasking that came right as he was cruelly striking down Jedi Padawan Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen), and shortly before he way-too-casually snapped the neck of Jedi Knight Yord Fandar (Charlie Barnett). The episode then concluded with Mae knocking out her twin Osha (also played by Stenberg) and deceptively assuming her place alongside Osha’s former Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae), leaving her sister to be found by the Stranger and completely resetting all the pieces on the game board with only three episodes left.
To paraphrase the renowned poet LL Cool J, that is a lot of destruction and terror and mayhem for a single episode, a fact that show creator Leslye Headland reveals made some folks behind the scenes a wee bit nervous. “I got some feedback when we were writing and prepping the episode that said, ‘Gosh, it’s just so much fighting. Don’t you think the audience will tune out at some point?'” laughs Headland. “And I said, ‘No, I feel really confident that they’re going to love this.'”
The installment was the culmination of what can only described as the biggest onscreen Jedi genocide since Emperor Palpatine went full hologram mode and issued the dreaded Order 66. The very first scene of The Acolyte set the tone as Carrie-Anne Moss‘ Indara was literally stabbed in the heart. An episode later, Dean Charles Chapman’s Torbin ended his decade-long Barash Vow to suck down some poison willingly.
Then it was the Wookiee Kelnacca’s turn to bite the dust, the Jedi hermit ending up on the receiving end of the Stranger’s laser sword. Adding injury to insult, poor Joonas Suotamo had to play dead in a Wookiee suit for way too long. “It was actually very uncomfortable,” recalls the actor, who has also played Chewbacca in three films. “The position that I am in, I was able to withstand that for about four-and-a-half minutes, and then I had to just stand up because those space chairs are not always that comfortable.” (Damn space chairs.)
But none of that could have prepared fans for the carnage to come in episode 5. For Headland, it was the body count she wanted to surprise people with, not the actual identity of the Stranger. The showrunner anticipated many would figure out the Qimir/Stranger connection before the unmasking, and was totally cool with that because she wasn’t trying to fool anyone in the first place — intentionally leaving breadcrumbs along the way. “I think a good twist is not about hiding everything from the audience and then throwing it on them like, ‘Hey, this is what you didn’t see! We hid it so well that you didn’t see this!'” says Headland. “I think a good twist is telegraphing what’s going to happen, and then once it does, executing it without an ounce of pity or sentimentality.”
Headland did have one trick up her sleeve, however — lulling the viewer into a false sense of security by sending some new (and clearly expendable) Jedi into the fray alongside her series stars. “That’s what I loved about starting with the red shirts,” she explains while momentarily slipping into Star Trek parlance. “You’re kind of like, ‘Oh, he’a just going to kill a bunch of red shirts, and everybody is going to be fine and… OH MY GOD, JECKI’S DEAD! Okay, I’m listening.'”
As for the brutality of the deaths — decapitations, Force pulling one victim onto a lightsaber protruding from the back of an already slain partner, snapping the neck of a defeated foe — even Headland was somewhat surprised by what she was able to get away with on the family-friendly franchise. “I just figured someone would stop me and nobody did,” she says with a laugh. “I figured someone would say, ‘This is too far!’ But they didn’t.”
The cast was certainly taken aback by the savagery. “We were all like, ‘Leslye, the way that you take them out is so brutal!'” laughs Stenberg. “‘What the hell? What kind of sick, twisted masochist are you?'” (Responds Headland: “I guess I always thought, ‘Well, Anakin killed a bunch of children, so…'”)
But even the victims themselves appreciated the extreme death toll put in place to raise the stakes. “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,” says Keen. “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.'”
Stenberg notes that it was clear to all during filming that the series was reaching a turning point through all the carnage. “There was definitely this energy on set that we were reaching some kind of climax and heading towards a different future. We were losing our cast members that we love so much, and I definitely felt like, ‘Oh, now it’s time for me to go on a more solemn journey,’ which kind of reflects the characters too.”
Indeed, when the dust storm kicked up by the Stranger finally settled, every single character at the end of the episode was in a much different place than when it began. Well, those who were still alive, anyway.
Natural Born Killer
While the deaths of Jecki and Yord may have shocked viewers, it was no surprise to the actors, who were informed of their untimely demises by Headland when they first took the jobs. “Honestly, that’s what really sold me,” says Keen. “That was the first thing she said to me in our meeting. She was like, ‘You might be playing an alien, and you die pretty early on,’ and I was like, ‘I’m in! I love playing dead!'”
Barnett used the knowledge to help inform his performance. “No one ever wants to be cut out of a show,” he explains. “But when you’re playing a character that you know is going to die, it’s a little more fun. If it’s a surprise to you and your job is gone next week, it sucks. But when you know what you’re walking into, you get to have a little more control over it. And I tried to find the lemonade through the lemons.”
The two partners-in-death bonded over their (duel of the) fates. “Me and Charlie were joking about that all the time,” says Keen, recalling their time filming with a smile. “Whenever we were on set and anyone would be complaining, me and Charlie would be like, ‘Peace out, we’re dying in two weeks!'”
Even Lee Jung-jae got into the fun at the expense of his onscreen Padawan. “We’d been doing a really long day, and I was like, ‘Ha, I die tomorrow,’ to JJ,” recalls Keen. “And JJ just looks at me and went, ‘I wish.’ Everyone was in on the joke that me and Charlie were so excited to die.”
Still, when push came to death, Barnett could not bring himself to witness his friend getting repeatedly lightsaber-stabbed into submission. “They asked me if I wanted to go watch Dafne’s death, and I was like, ‘No, are you f—ing kidding me? I love her. I don’t want to see her die four times over. It’s just visceral and f—ed up and sad. No, I don’t need all that.'”
The person doing the dying in that scene had a somewhat rosier take on filming Jecki’s final breaths. “I had so much fun doing the death,” says Keen, whose end also coincided with the identity reveal of the Stranger when her lifeless body crumpled to the ground. “It was a huge honor to get to be the person that took the helmet off him,” she beams while heralding her character’s final act. “That was something really exciting to me.”
And exciting to Jacinto, who had been patiently waiting to strut his stuff as the lightsaber-wielding menace. The Stranger was actually inspired by the character of Drunken Cat from the 1966 Hong Kong martial arts film Come Drink With Me. A seemingly inebriated goofball concerned only with finding his next beverage and occasionally breaking into song, Drunken Cat is later revealed to be a powerful Shaolin master who takes down a group of hostage-holding bandits. However, Headland wanted to flip the script, making her ruse character a force of evil. Once she started fleshing out her villain in hiding, “Manny immediately came up for me as the perfect person to do this.”
It seemed like a natural match. After all, Jacinto had already fooled audiences once as a Blake Bortles-loving Florida DJ posing as a Taiwanese Buddhist Monk on The Good Place. But it was actually his role on another series that caught Headland’s attention. “I watched Nine Perfect Strangers during the pandemic, and when he first came on screen, I was like, ‘Who is that guy? How do I know him?’ And then I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s Manny Jacinto! What the f—?’ So seeing that dichotomy of him being able to do two ends of the spectrum, I felt a lot of confidence in him.”
So confident, it turns out, that Jacinto did not even have to audition for the part. And once he signed on, he and Headland worked in close collaboration to bring the evil Drunken Cat to life. “We talked a lot about how you take a low-status character and convert him to a badass,” says the actor. “He’s a guy that is so under the radar, that nobody is paying attention to, and all of a sudden he’s actually the guy pulling the strings.”
Of course, pulling those strings — and pulling no punches — took a lot of behind-the-scenes work. “I had almost four months to train for that flight scene,” says Jacinto. “This was the first time I really got to dig into something with so much action and really make use of my dance background. We worked on everything. We did boxing, we worked on kicks, we worked on all the choreography. It was tough. They conditioned my body so that I could get through this five-person fight scene.”
He didn’t just get through it, he owned it. That is indeed Jacinto under the mask for almost every shot, as the actor asked — and was allowed — to do the majority of his fight stunts.
“He had been waiting for this moment the whole shoot,” says Stenberg. “Manny put in so much preparation, he completely transformed physically. He became incredibly skilled at lightsaber work. He put in months of prep in the time that he wasn’t filming his other character. So I just felt so happy for him, that he was able to demonstrate everything he had been working towards.” Even if that meant killing almost everything and everyone that moved.
Read the article in full here, and stream the first five episodes of The Acolyte on Disney+ now.
