It’s the the Dark Side’s time to shine in the exciting first look at the upcoming Disney+ Star Wars series The Acolyte.
The trailer begins with a Jedi talking to a group of younglings. He tells them to close their eyes and asks, “tell me, what comes into your mind.” After the first two say “life,” and “balance,” a third child says ominously, “I see fire.”
Throughout the trailer, the character played by Amandla Stenberg is a non-stop badass, using amazing force-assisted martial arts, wearing cool armor and a cloak, and looking like they’re about to be our new favorite Star Wars character.
One interesting thing is that, while the trailer is full of force users fighting each other, lightsabers aren’t used for most of the fights. In fact, when we first see a red lightsaber, at the end of the trailer, it seems like the Jedi have never seen one before.
The show, described as a mystery-thriller, is set in the High Republic era, long before the original Star Wars trilogy or prequels. It explores a time when the Jedi were in full power, before the Sith had started to influence both the Council and the Republic.
The Acolyte stars Amandla Stenberg, Carrie-Ann Moss, Lee Jung-jae, Dafne Keen, Rebecca Henderson, and Manny Jacinto.
The first two episodes will premiere on Disney+ June 4. Watch the trailer below.
In 2021, Headland talked to The Advocate about the show, and the queer lens through which she made it.
“In the same way that the original Star Wars film, A New Hope, is about a young man living in Modesto, Calif., who doesn’t want to take over his dad's hardware store... there’s just no way that me being a queer woman is not going to be reflected in my work. I could try not to do it, but why would I? It just feels like a natural extension of what I do.”
“I think that you can expect some sort of combination of both,” she says about having both the queer lens and actual on-screen queer representation in The Acolyte. "You can expect some sort of expression of my own artistic dream and just my voice and what it looks like in that universe, for sure. But I also think that representation both on screen and behind the screen, it’s just so important.”