After Disney Decanonized Material, ‘The Acolyte’ Showrunner Leslye Headland Says Upcoming Star Wars Series Will Use EU Lore: “I Thought It Was So Cool And No One Told Me I Couldn’t”
Spencer Baculi
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Remember when Disney de-canonized the entirety of Star Wars’ Expanded Universe – labeling under the new title ‘Star Wars Legends’ – ostensibly in order to let them ‘chart their own era’ for the franchise?
Well, in the wake of all of those plans leading to financial and reputational disaster, The Acolyte showrunner Leslye Headland has confirmed that her upcoming Disney Plus series will soon be re-canonizing some pieces of “EU lore”.
Headland – who many may remember for her time serving as Harvey Weinstein’s personal assistant from 2003-2007 – provided this insight into her upcoming High Republic Era series while speaking to StarWars.com on March 19th following the world premiere of The Acolyte‘s first trailer.
Asked about which parts of the Star Wars universe she had been most excited to engage with, Headland recalled, “There were certain things that I really wanted to do.”
“You’ll see a half Theelin, half human Jedi, Jecki, played by Dafne Keen, which was always a dream of mine,” said the showrunner. “There’s also some EU lore that I decided to put in because I thought it was so cool and no one told me I couldn’t. There are a couple of really big EU ideas that are utilized both early on in the series and later in the series.”
Regarding which elements from the original Star Wars EU would make its ‘canon debut’ in The Acolyte, Headland was light on details, only noting that among them would be a Zygerrian Jedi – otherwise known as the humanoid cat people seen in Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) – and an as-of-yet-unknown species.
As noted above, Disney’s turn to revisiting the Star Wars EU’s comes off as particularly desperate given Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy’s previous attempts to distance the franchise from these materials.
Speaking to the studio’s approach to The Rise of Skywalker‘s role as the conclusion of the Skywalker Saga, Kennedy told Rolling Stone a month before the film’s release, “There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books. We don’t have 800-page novels. We don’t have anything other than passionate storytellers who get together and talk about what the next iteration might be.”
“We go through a really normal development process that everybody else does,” she added. “You start by talking to filmmakers who you think exhibit the sensibilities that you’re looking for. And I would argue that the list is very small — people who really do have the sensibilities about these kind of movies, and then the experience and the ability to handle how enormous a job these movies are. So we try to be as thoughtful as we possibly can about making those choices. I would also argue that sometimes people get involved in the normal development process, and then they realize, ‘Oh, my God, this is so much more than I ever imagined.'”
“So it’s pretty common that when you’re working on movies, you’re not making choices and decisions that necessarily work out exactly the way you want from the get-go,” the Lucasfilm president further detailed. “It’s been an evolving process with lots of people and lots of opinions, and then you try to shape something into what it eventually becomes. I feel really fortunate that I’ve worked with so many great people that have been absolutely committed, J.J. being one of them. He’s a huge fan, incredibly passionate about Star Wars, and has been from the moment he and I sat down and started talking about this. And the more he got involved, the more excited he became.”
Drawing her thoughts to a close, Kennedy ultimately affirmed, “So I think if you asked him today, he probably wishes he’d been in a situation where he could have done all three — but as I said, these are huge projects. So it’s very difficult unless there’s three or four years in between. It’s not really physically possible.”
And all this after they went through all of that trouble of rewriting Kyle Katarn and Jans Ors’ story for Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso in Rogue One.
At current, The Acolyte is set to start telling the tale of the Jedi Order’s fall from grace on June 24th.
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