Leslye Headland has been telling “Star Wars” stories on screen since she was a teenager. Ostracized at school for being different, she withdrew into herself and made stop-motion films featuring her action figures.
So when she found success as an adult in Hollywood — Headland helped create “Russian Doll,” the 2019 Netflix comedy starring Natasha Lyonne — and got the chance to create an actual “Star Wars” series , it was the realization of a lifelong dream.
And a chance of humiliating failure. On a galactic scale.
“I basically cold-called Lucasfilm and, after many conversations, found myself pitching a series – completely thrilled, my ultimate career goal, the culmination of my fandom,” Headland said. “At the same time, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. There is so much pressure. It’s extreme. I had never done anything this big before.
Headland’s series, “The Acolyte,” will debut on Disney+ on June 4. Costing an estimated $180 million (for eight episodes) and taking four years to make, it attempts two feats at once: pleasing old-school “Star Wars” fans — which may seem distasteful — while telling a fully fledged story. novel, which requires no prior knowledge of “Star Wars” and which highlights women and people of color.
For the faithful, “The Acolyte” features loads of Jedi, a core franchise that other live-action “Star Wars” TV shows have depicted sparingly, if at all. The opening scene of “The Acolyte” takes place in a restaurant filled with colorful aliens, a callback to the Mos Eisley cantina from the first “Star Wars” film, in 1977.
Other shouts to core fans – we see you, we haven’t forgotten you – are peppered throughout the dialogue: “May the force be with you” and “I have a bad feeling about this” make their first appearance .
At the same time, “The Acolyte” embraces what some call “New Star Wars,” an era defined by diversity and expansion beyond the Skywalker saga, which began with Disney’s purchase of the franchise in 2012.
Amandla Stenberg plays a dreadlocked warrior who has a complicated relationship with a Jedi master played by Lee Jung-jae of “Squid Game,” in his first English-speaking role. Jodie Turner-Smith (“Queen & Slim”) plays the lesbian leader of a royal coven of witches, while Filipino-Canadian actor Manny Jacinto (“The Good Place”) appears as a shadowy trader. In one of her most action-oriented roles since “The Matrix,” Carrie-Anne Moss plays a steely Jedi named Master Indara.
“The Acolyte” also innovates behind the camera: while women have directed episodes of series like “The Mandalorian” and “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Headland, 43, is the first to create a “Star Wars” series.
“It was like working on a razor’s edge,” she said during a Zoom interview, pushing her oversized glasses higher on her nose. “You think, ‘This is what people expect from Star Wars.’ This is what people don’t do it to want.’ It can mess with your head.
“During the creative process,” she continued, “I had to forgive myself, as an artist, for falling off the razor – as long as I got back up again. It was my promise to myself.
From the second a new “Star Wars” project is made public — Disney announced “The Acolyte” in 2020 — fans are searching for information and picking apart what they find. That’s part of what makes “Star Wars” so powerful: People care. But this attention also creates problems.
Rumors can turn into facts. Some “Star Wars” obsessives, for example, worry that Headland’s series will “break canon” or tinker with already established storylines in the franchise — the ultimate “Star Wars” crime. It’s not.
In fact, Headland chose to place “The Acolyte” at the very beginning of the “Star Wars” timeline so that canonical issues would be minimal. The series is a mystery thriller – someone is killing Jedi – set in a time when the Jedi are at their peak, the pre-“Phantom Menace” era that was explored in the “Star Wars” novels but never on the screen. The only character from “The Acolyte” who previously existed in the franchise is a Jedi Master from the novels named Vernestra Rwoh. (Headland gave the role to his wife, Rebecca Henderson, giving her a lightsaber that can transform into a whip.)
“Leslye wanted this show to be accessible — no homework needed before watching,” said Jocelyn Bioh, the Ghanaian-American writer. Headland added Bioh to the writing staff of “The Acolyte” specifically because Bioh was not a “Star Wars” enthusiast.
“She asked me what I knew about Star Wars and my answer was: Harrison Ford running in space with a giant dog?,” Bioh recalls with a laugh. “And Leslye said, ‘You’re hired.'”
“She wanted to potentially invite new fans – people like me,” Bioh said.
The first trailer for Acolyte, released in March, was viewed 51.3 million times in its first 24 hours, a record for a live-action Star Wars series, including The Mandalorian, according to Lucasfilm. Footage from “Acolyte,” released in theaters in early May, highlighted the show’s unique martial arts sequences; fan sites immediately judged the Force Fu fighting style.
But a large and vocal portion of the “Star Wars” fandom reacted in predictable ways.
“Why are there so many women, girls, and minority characters increasingly dominating the ranks of the Jedi?” reads one comment on the trailer for “The Acolyte,” with others expressing a similar worldview.
It’s a version of the same misogyny and racism that greeted Rey, the female Jedi (played by Daisy Ridley) who debuted in 2015’s “The Force Awakens,” and that drove Kelly Marie Tran off social media when she appeared in “The Force Awakens” The Last Jedi” (2017). Kathleen Kennedy, who runs Lucasfilm, has also experienced this, with “South Park” harshly attacking her in an episode last year. The cartoon depicted Kennedy giving the same comments over and over to the creators of “Star Wars”: “Put a chick in it!” Make her lame and gay!
Some trolls have dubbed Headland’s series “The Wokelyte.”
In a brief telephone interview, Kennedy’s support for “The Acolyte” was unwavering. “I believe that storytelling should be representative of everyone,” she said. “It’s an easy decision for me.”
“Operating within these giant franchises now, with social media and the level of expectation, it’s terrifying,” Kennedy continued. “I think Leslye struggled with that a bit. I think a lot of women who get into “Star Wars” have a little more difficulty with that. Because the fan base is very male dominated, they are sometimes attacked in quite personal ways.
Headland tried to limit her exposure to online conversations, both good and bad, instead relying on her friends for “weather reports.”
“As a fan myself, I know how frustrating some Star Wars storytelling has been in the past,” Headland said, declining to cite specific examples. “I felt it myself.”
She followed up with a text message. “I maintain my empathy for Star Wars fans,” she wrote. “But I want to be clear. Anyone who engages in sectarian, racist or hateful comments… I don’t consider them a fan.”
“Star Wars” projects are not known for their personal or idiosyncratic filmmaking. Production and marketing budgets are simply too high; the storytelling needs to appeal to the widest possible audience for the numbers to work.
Rian Johnson, who directed “The Last Jedi,” told The New York Times in 2017 that he didn’t even try to put his own stamp on the franchise. “It would be bad news if you said to yourself, ‘How can I make this my own?’ ” “, did he declare.
Kennedy, however, pushed Headland to do just that with “The Acolyte.”
“You’ve written a great Star Wars series,” Kennedy told him in 2019 in response to early scripts. “Now go write a Leslye Headland show.”
Kennedy had read one of Headland’s plays, “Cult of Love,” which explores a complex relationship between siblings. “It’s about his personal experience,” Kennedy said. “And it was so well done and incredibly moving. I remember reading that and saying, “Leslye, this is exactly what you should be tapping into when you write this story for us.” »
Explaining exactly how Headland followed Kennedy’s advice would spoil a major plot point of “Acolyte.” Let’s just say that Headland accentuated the clash between the characters.
“I have a very strained relationship with my youngest sister, and I feel like one of the reasons she’s strained is because we both see ourselves as the bad guys,” Headland said. “And if I were to tell a story about villains, it seemed to me that the starting point should be a family relationship in which one person is categorically convinced of its rightness and the other person is also categorically convinced of its rightness.”
“We don’t talk,” Headland added. “I think it will be a surprise for her.”
She said nothing further on the subject except to point out that she has a good relationship with her other sister, who helped put together a visual presentation that Headland used to pitch “The Acolyte” to Lucasfilm . (Headland described his concept at the meeting as “‘Frozen’ meets ‘Kill Bill.'” Kennedy bought it on the spot.)
Stenberg, the star of the series, said: “Leslye is truly driven by emotion, heart and relationships. So even though our series is set in the Star Wars universe and takes place in space, in a galaxy far, far away, it’s very much a family drama.
Headland had directed independent films (“Bachelorette,” “Sleeping With Other People”) and served as showrunner for “Russian Doll,” the hit Netflix comedy about a New Yorker (Natasha Lyonne) caught in a reincarnation loop . But she had never managed a big-budget production.
What she lacked in experience, she made up for with the geekdom of “Star Wars.” Headland became a “Star Wars” superfan as a teenager. It was an apocalyptic time in her life, or at least that’s what it felt like.
“I had no friends,” she recalls. “I had lunch in the bathroom.”
She found solace among the misfits in George Lucas’ space operas, discovering books like Timothy Zahn’s “Heir to the Empire” (1991) and collecting action figures. When Lucas released “special editions” of his first three “Star Wars” films, Headland stood in line at his local theater on opening night. A few years ago, she got Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art for Princess Leia tattooed on her right hand.
“‘Star Wars’ has been a part of my personality since I can remember,” Headland said. “So working on this series has been a dream. I had to take my chance.
She stopped for a moment. “If it doesn’t succeed, it’s because of me,” she said. “It’s really scary to think about.”
“No, no, I’m not going to go,” she said, stepping back onto the razor’s edge.