Acolyte Star ‘Got Tripped Up’ Trying to Pull Off Twins’ Complicated Duality

Warning! The Following Contains SPOILERS for The Acolyte Season 1, Episode 5, “Night.”

Parent Trap alert! Wake up, Master Sol… you’re traveling with the wrong twin. Through four episodes of the new Star Wars series, The Acolyte, actress Amandla Stenberg has done an excellent job of portraying identical twin sisters, Osha and Mae. However, the stakes went up considerably thanks to showrunner Leslye Headland, because the sister who runs with the Sith, Mae, is now secretly posing as her sibling and has taken up with Jedi Master Sol.

Portraying both characters was already a challenge. Now, though, Stenberg has to not only be both people, but she has to pull off Mae pretending to be Osha, too! And it is easy to understand how the actress “got tripped up sometimes.” Stenberg said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:

“I got tripped up sometimes in my head because we had a conversation of: How good of an actress is Mae?
I really made decisions from the place of what I just thought would be interesting for people to watch.
And what I thought would be the most interesting is if it felt like they were two very distinct people.
I thought narratively it would be more engaging and more fun to follow that way.”

The Acolyte

2/5

Star Wars series that take viewers into a galaxy of shadowy secrets and emerging dark-side powers in the final days of the High Republic era.

Release Date

June 4, 2024

Cast

Amandla Stenberg , Lee Jung-jae , Joonas Suotamo , Charlie Barnett , Dafne Keen , Leah Brady , Manny Jacinto , Rebecca Henderson , Carrie-Anne Moss , Jodie Turner-Smith , Dean-Charles Chapman , Lauren Brady , Anthony J. Abraham , Thara Shöön , Danielle Xin Yao Waterman , Sienna Khiroya , Jeramiah Evans , Dan Milne , Thomas Coombes , Archie Singh Swali , Nick Court , Ed Kear , Jumayn Hunter , Scroobius Pip , Abigail Thorn , Margarita Levieva , Amy Tsang , Saskia Allen , Deborah Rosan , Tabitha Alege , Paul Bullion , Indra Ové , Derek Arnold , Lewis Young

Seasons

1

Studio

Disney+, Lucasfilm

Franchise

Star Wars

Number of Episodes

8

Streaming Service(s)

Disney+

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Stenberg said in the same interview (below):

“So, with Mae pretending to be Osha,
I actually started by thinking, ‘Well, how would Mae wear Osha’s clothes?
She wouldn’t wear them the way Osha does.’
And so, we made slight tweaks here and there —
less so that the clothes would look different than they do on Osha, but more so I could feel as I was wearing them that I was Mae.”

Amandla Stenberg Has a Grasp on Both Sisters: ‘I Understood Who They Were’

In fairness, Amandla Stenberg’s Mae and Osha kind of felt as if they were placed on the back burner during The Acolyte’s fifth episode, “Night.” The mysterious Sith lord’s identity was revealed, and “The Stranger” (Manny Jacinto) went toe-to-toe with an entire team of Jedi — and he slaughtered all but one of them in an unforgettable lightsaber duel. It’s easy to see how Mae and Osha might get lost in the shuffle.

But the attention shifts back to the twins toward the end as Mae secretly takes her sister’s place and leaves with Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae). And for Stenberg, “the ideological hatred” turned out to be a “complex” component of trying to differentiate the sisters during such a critical point in the storytelling. Stenberg said in the same interview with EW:

“The ideolgoical hatred is such a complex thing because it’s really passion that’s just steeped in belief systems.
And so, it was really important for me that I truly believe the perspective of each sister, which
Leslye [Headland] crafted in a way that has a lot of nuance and depth.
So, I just had to believe the circumstances for each one. And physically at that point,
I’d spent a lot of time with both of them, so I understood who they were.”

Related

Acolyte Showrunner Discusses Possibility of Season 2: ‘I Threw Everything into Season 1’

Leslye Headland discusses the possibility of making The Acolyte Season 2 as the Disney+ series approaches its final three episodes.

So, where do the twins go from here? The Stranger has found an unconscious Osha, Mae is pretending to be her sister and Master Sol is completely oblivious that Star Wars storytelling has pulled The Parent Trap on him!

And don’t forget, the Sith warrior wiped out two of the show’s main characters, Padawan Jecki Lon and Jedi Yord Fandar, who were portrayed respectively by Dafne Keen and Charlie Barnett. There’s a great disturbance in the Force, but Sol can’t seem to feel it… yet.