The Acolyte creator Leslye Headland is pushing back against trolls’ claims that the show has made Star Wars “woke” by including queer characters.
Set roughly a century before the events of 1999’s The Phantom Menace, the Disney+ series centers on Mae and Osha (both played by Amandla Stenberg), twins who find themselves at odds as Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) investigates a killing spree targeting his fellow Jedi. The Acolyte’s third episode flashes back to the twins’ childhood with their two late mothers, who were part of a witchy, all-female space coven and created Mae and Osha without a father. In the most recent episode, Osha asked about the pronouns of an alien Jedi named Bazil.
Although Star Wars is a vast sci-fi universe with laser swords and Jar Jar Binks, the existence of queer women, people of color, and pronouns within the franchise was somehow where online trolls drew the line. Despite being well-received by critics with an 85% Rotten Tomatoes score at the time of writing, The Acolyte has been relentlessly review-bombed on the review aggregator site. The show currently has a meager 13% average audience score and, as Forbes notes, it has received over 25,000 total user scores over the past few weeks — more than all three seasons of The Mandalorian combined.
“This show introduces non-canon elements and clearly is pushing ‘woke’ ideas into its horrible narrative,” one viewer wrote. “This is not the show you are looking for.”
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Backlash against the show began before it even started airing, after an interview in which The Wrap reporter Drew Taylor posited that The Acolyte is “arguably the gayest Star Wars by a considerable margin” went viral. However, in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Headland said that wasn’t her intention.
“Honestly, I feel sad that people would think that if something were gay, that that would be bad,” she said. “It makes me feel sad that a bunch of people on the internet would somehow dismantle what I consider to be the most important piece of art that I’ve ever made.”
Despite featuring a two-mom witch community and several openly queer actors — including Stenberg, who identifies as nonbinary and gay, gay actor Charlie Barnett, and Headland’s wife, queer actress Rebecca Henderson — Headland is reluctant to describe The Acolyte as implicitly gay.
“I was surprised by [The Wrap’s] question,” she added. “Amandla and I just burst out laughing because that’s our knee-jerk reaction to being asked that, but to be honest, I don’t know what the term ‘gay’ means in that sense. I don’t believe I’ve created queer with a capital Q content.”
To Headland, the queerness of Mae and Osha’s mothers, Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Mother Koril (Margarita Levieva), was circumstantial.
“They’re in a matriarchal society. As a gay woman, I knew it would read that their sexuality is queer, but there also aren’t any men in their community,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “So a closeness between the two of them would be natural… I would say it’s really reductive to call them lesbians. I think it means you’re not really paying attention to this story.”
Still, the showrunner went on to stress that she’s not against queer audiences resonating with The Acolyte.
“I’m proud of being a gay woman who’s accomplished this feat, and certainly, if my content is called queer, I don’t want to disown whatever queerness is in the show,” Headland said. “I would be proud to create something that inspired queer people.”
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