‘The Acolyte’ Showrunner Leslye Headland Says Sith Lord’s ‘Smile Helmet’ Is “Meant To Be Really Unsettling To The Jedi”
Smile!
According to series showrunner Leslye Headland, the ‘toothy grin’ emblazoned across the helmet of The Acolyte‘s resident Sith Lord is not intended to be hilarious, but rather a genuinely fear-inducing feature of his overall appearance.
Headland provided this insight into The Stranger’s costuming while speaking to Entertainment Weekly alongside The Acolyte‘s main cast following the premiere of its fifth episode, Night.
Addressing the episode’s ‘twist’ (which most viewers could see coming from a million miles away) that Mae’s master was none other than her smuggler ally Qimir, Headland told the outlet’s Dalton Ross, “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!'”
“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,” she added.
To this end, the showrunner then revealed that when it came to casting The Stranger, his current actor, The Good Place‘s Manny Jacinto, “immediately came up for me as the perfect person to do this.”
“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?'” recalled Headland. “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.”
Later on in the interview, Jacinto himself would admit that, when it came to The Stranger’s visual design, he and Headland “wanted a character that was not just oppressive and powerful, but when you see him, you feel disturbed by him.”
“We wanted a character that isn’t just a Darth Vader type of guy who overpowers the screen,” said the actor. “It’s the concept of the uncanny. It can be a stumble in a person’s walk or a twitch in somebody’s eye. It’s very subtle, and it’s just like this uncomfortableness that people experience — and that’s what we wanted to hone in on for this Sith Lord.”
Jumping off from Jacinto’s explanation, Headland further detail that “[The Stranger’s] helmet’s not that different from a [classic] Star Wars villain, But the grin is like this smile that lasts too long, and was meant to be really unsettling to the Jedi.”
“It’s not that they’re afraid of him, it’s that they find him unsettling,” she clarified. “Even his intro, when he floats down at the end of episode 4, we shot that in reverse because we just wanted the audience to be like, ‘What is this?'”
Closing out their discussion of the Sith Lord’s specifically, Jacinto ultimately revealed that his line at the close of the episode – “What extraordinary beings we are. Even in the revelation of our triumph, we see the depth of our despair” – was, in his opinion, “essentially our introduction into the third act.”
“It’s basically summing up everything that you thought you knew in these first episodes,” he reasoned. “Now we’re going into completely different territory. Now it’s a different world that we’re going to introduce you to, and not just a new story, but new motivations for all of the different characters.”
Mae’s mission is set to continue when The Acolyte‘s next episode hits Disney Plus on June 29th.
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