Star Wars: The Acolyte: Amandla Stanberg on playing the lead role

Rising star Amandla Stenberg reveals the new obsession she has via her new Star Wars spin-off – Acolyte and the shocks fans can expect.

Star Wars actor Amandla Stenberg apologises to any future partners or children that she might have – but she thinks she’s probably already had the best day of her life.

Not only has the rising star scored the lead role in the latest small-screen spin-off show in that galaxy far, far away, but it also brought her musical moment she will never forget.

As well as being a respected actor, with credits in The Hunger Games, The Hate U Give and Bodies Bodies Bodies, Stenberg is also a gifted singer and violinist.

So when she was given the chance to perform one of the famous Star Wars themes – using an arrangement for solo violin by its composer, 92-year-old Oscar and Grammy-winning living legend John Williams – she just about lost her mind.

“It’s the top one,” Stenberg says when asked where the honour ranks among her life moments.

“I’m going to have children and it’ll be like ‘Number one – playing The Force Theme written by John Williams, number two – having you’.

“It was it was really unreal and just such a great idea from Disney. I felt so loved and supported that they gave me this incredible opportunity and it was like this natural way to show how much I love the Star Wars scores.

The Acolyte's Amandla Stenberg poses at Disneyland on May 21, 2024 in Anaheim, California. Picture: by Leon Bennett/Getty Images for Disney)

“I’m just so grateful for John taking the time to transcribe it for me on solo violin and the engineers in the room. It was just so nerve-racking and so rewarding, this entire experience.”

Stenberg might have already been a huge Star Wars fan, but that doesn’t mean signing up The Acolyte was an automatic yes. After breaking through at the age of 14 as the tragic Rue in the first Hunger Games film, Stenberg has leaned more into drama rather than action blockbusters and she knew that joining the much loved sci-fi adventure franchise would come with a whole new level of scrutiny as well as nearly 50 years of fan expectations and baggage.

“I thought about the responsibility a lot,” she admits. “I thought about how it could potentially shift or change my life. I thought about the exposure. I thought about the implications and the immense amount of pressure around it and then I just kind of got this tingly sensation over my whole body. I’m not trying to be corny, but I was like ‘Oh, it’s the Force – okay, I’m supposed to do this’.”

Stenberg found that she had a “partner in crime” in The Acolyte’s creator, Leslye Headland, who was impressed not just by her lead actor’s resume but also her dedication and swagger.

“I was even more attracted to her and drawn in by her because of her fandom for the franchise, and then also her incredible confidence and she’s just unflappable,” says Headland.

“There’s no way to throw her off her game. Once she’s decided to commit to something, she commits to it so fully. That was also something that really drew me to her – having a partner in crime and instead of just a lead actor.”

Amandla Stenberg, Lee Jung-jae and Director Leslye Headland on the set of The Acolyte. .

The pair bonded over the movies they liked including Donnie Darko and Fight Club, but it was their mutual admiration of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill action classics that really paid off. Headland had actually pitched her vision of The Acolyte to Star Wars boss Kathleen Kennedy as “Kill Bill meets Frozen” (“she was like ‘okaaaaaay – what does that mean?’,” she says with a laugh) and the spectacular opening sequence of the first episode is a homage to the scene where Uma Thurman’s The Bride takes on The Crazy 88.

The scene in question introduces Stenberg’s vengeful, knife-wielding assassin Mae by having her face off against a serene, Force-fu-fighting Jedi played by Carrie-Anne Moss. Any resemblance to Trinity, Moss’s kick-ass freedom fighter from The Matrix movies is entirely intentional.

“100%,” agrees Headland. “I mean she’s so iconic and such a force – her action work as incredible. She’s also a stunning actor. I think that’s the thing that in her iconicness, people don’t remember that she’s this incredible, incredible deep thinker, and an actor with an enormous amount of skill.”

To pull it off, as well the high-octane action and stunts that fill the eight-part series, Stenberg had to go through six weeks of martial arts and weapons training with stunt performer and fight choreographer Junchang Lu, who had also worked on Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Bullet Train. Starting slowly with drills and repetition, she proved to be an adept learner and developed a deep love for martial arts, to the point that she had to be told to take it easy.

Amandla Stenberg as Mae in The Acolyte.

“They had to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to rehearse after work anymore,” Stenberg says. “Because I would always want to come in and rehearse more. That’s just my coping mechanism, when I’m anxious about something is just obsessing over it, and they told me it wasn’t allowed to do that anymore.

“I think it was actually good, because I started just leaning more into my intuition and trusting myself and trusting all of the physicality I had already learned. Then I just got faster and better and then I was able to learn sequences on the spot and that was more Force-like.”

Having won over the Star Wars bosses with her initial pitch, Headland then had to put her own spin on a franchise that now comprises three film trilogies, more than a dozen animated and live action TV shows, plus books, comics and video games.

To do that, she opted to set the action in a little explored time period at the end of the High Republic, before creator George Lucas’ divisive prequel series. As a mega-fan for whom the original ‘70s trilogy was a formative experience, in hindsight she realises that she’s borrowed bits of many different Star Wars projects from across the decades.

Amandla Stenberg during fight training on The Acolyte.

“When I look back on it, it’s a time period similar to the prequels,” she says. “It’s practical sets and wire work and all of that kind of tactile filmmaking like the original trilogy. It’s definitely got the spirit of The Mandalorian and wanting to capture a bit of the intimacy of the characters and that one-on-one connection between characters that you see in Mandalorian. Hopefully it brings a little bit of the darker tones that Andor introduced and then a lot of the Clone Wars were very influential. A couple of different storylines with Ahsoka and Anakin for sure – that master-apprentice struggle.”

As for Stenberg, even with The Acolyte days away from release, she’s still trying to wrap her head around the enormity of it all.

“It feels crazy,” she says. “It’s such a large universe with such an international impact and such a long legacy. I don’t think we are able to process it and it’ll probably take some time – maybe it will hit me later, when I tell my grandchildren about it or something.”

The Acolyte streams on Disney+ from Wednesday.

Originally published as Star Wars: The Acolyte: Amandla Stanberg on playing the lead role