To endure, Star Wars will need new actors, new characters, and a new era, vaulting away from the timeline as we know it. Another upcoming series, The Acolyte, reportedly starring Amandla Stenberg, aims to do that. The show is in the casting phase, but the writing is largely complete, says showrunner Leslye Headland, cocreator of the time-looping Netflix show Russian Doll. She has been planning for it for two years, mostly from the confines of her home. Her dog and cat, who peek in curiously from the background of Zoom conversations, are certainly steeped in the concept of the galaxy’s High Republic era, she says, but casual Star Wars fans who haven’t been following the recent novels and comics might still be unaware.
The Acolyte, Headland says, takes place roughly 100 years before The Phantom Menace: “A lot of those characters haven’t even been born yet. We’re taking a look at the political and personal and spiritual things that came up in a time period that we don’t know much about. My question when watching The Phantom Menace was always like, ‘Well, how did things get to this point?’ How did we get to a point where a Sith lord can infiltrate the Senate and none of the Jedi pick up on it? Like, what went wrong? What are the scenarios that led us to this moment?”
Headland describes The Acolyte as a mystery thriller set in a prosperous and seemingly peaceful era, when the galaxy is still sleek and glistening. “We actually use the term the Renaissance, or the Age of Enlightenment,” she says. Jedis were not always ascetic monklike figures living selflessly and bravely. “The Jedi uniforms are gold and white, and it’s almost like they would never get dirty. They would never be out and about,” Headland says. “The idea is that they could have these types of uniforms because that’s how little they’re getting into skirmishes.”