The showrunner for Star Wars: The Acolyte, Leslye Headland, says she drew heavy inspiration from RPGs such as KOTOR.
The showrunner for Star Wars: The Acolyte, Leslye Headland, recently talked with Vanity Fair in an interview for her upcoming series set in the High Republic era. There, she talked about her inspiration for The Acolyte and how she was inspired by the extended universe, or Legends, material in the 90s.
“She is a gigantic Star Wars fan,” says Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. “What’s wonderful about Leslye is she knows it all. I mean, she’s read a gazillion books inside the E.U. There are little bits and pieces that she’s drawing from that no one has explored yet in the onscreen storytelling.”
“In the prequels, Mace Windu says: ‘There’s no way that the Sith could have reemerged without us knowing about it.’ And Yoda says, ‘Hard to see the dark side is,’” Headland points out. “He acknowledges that this is a part of the Force that has been dormant, or at least hidden from them, for so long. What I immediately wondered about this particular period was: who is practicing it?”
Vanity Fair: How do you explain the High Republic to a Star Wars fan who may not yet be familiar with the stories the books have been telling?
The way I would explain the High Republic, and specifically where my show takes place, is that I’m about 100 years before The Phantom Menace. So, a lot of those characters haven’t even been born yet. My question in watching The Phantom Menace was always like, “Well, how did things get to this point?” Do you know what I mean? How did we get to where a Sith lord can infiltrate the Senate and none of the Jedi pick up on it? What went wrong? What are the scenarios that led us to this moment? So that’s what I would say. That’s how I would describe it to my friends, especially my non-Star Wars friends.
The way you’re describing it reminds me of the Roman era, a time where that empire was very powerful and fairly technologically advanced. Then that region of the world falls into a period of barbarism, and the Dark Ages follow. Is that similar to what you’re talking about here? Is the High Republic an era of education and advancement and glory, while the Star Wars movies and shows that we know best are from a time of collapse and decay?
Yes. We actually use the term the Renaissance, or the Age Of Enlightenment. There doesn’t necessarily need to be an uprising among people in the expanded regions or in the inner worlds, because everybody’s doing so well. For what I’m exploring, another good analogy might be post World War I in the United States, where we very much got into this isolationist concept of: we’re not helping anybody. We want to protect this particular vibe that we have going. [Laughs.] ‘Vibe’ is definitely not the word they use.
So the leaders of this galactic era would rather ignore conflict or suffering than resolve it?
The High Republic is so golden in so many ways. The Jedi uniforms are gold and white and it’s almost like they would never get dirty. They would never be out and about. The idea is that they could have these types of uniforms because that’s how little they’re getting into skirmishes. So of course my question is like, ‘Well, what else is going on?’ You can’t just end up with George’s Phantom Menace situation if everything is going well.
It has to be going well at the expense of what? What is not being attended to? What are we turning a blind eye to that could lead to the rise of somebody like Palpatine about a century later? Yes, it’s one bad guy, but it’s one bad guy that completely undermines the entire system of government. A lot of other things must have been going on beneath the surface.
What are some of your cinematic influences for the show?
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Jon Favreau said that when you’re working in this world, you want to go back to what George was inspired by. There were Westerns and then of course, Akira Kurosawa samurai films, and the fact that he originally offered Obi-Wan Kenobi to Toshiro Mifune …
So I actually went more toward martial arts films, and storylines that are a little bit more personal and less global and galactic. Those warriors were on missions that were deeply personal, with people feeling wronged and having to make it right. Wuxia Films and martial arts films from King Hu and the Shaw Brothers, like Come Drink With Me and Touch Of Zen. They’re monks that are also martial arts heroes.
Since this is the first screen story told from the High Republic era, what was their ambition for it? Were they looking to break free of the well-explored Star Wars universe?
The truth is that I, as a major mega fan, came to them with this idea. And I said, ‘I think the best place to put this is in an era you guys have not quite explored yet.’ They were very enthusiastic. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to explore that [existing] world, but I think that they already were because The Mandalorian and a lot of the other television projects were really relying on legacy characters.
I was coming at it as a fan who was much more into the RPG [role-playing games] that the Extended Universe feeds on. I came hard at that in the ’90s, and then got introduced to [the animated series] The Clone Wars. I knew the timeline really well. And I was like, “I think if you want to explore Star Wars from the perspective of the bad guys, the best time to do it is when the bad guys are wildly outnumbered. When they actually are essentially the underdogs, for lack of a better term.” So this would be that era.
There’s always a lot of pressure around Star Wars. What are the stakes of this show from a franchise standpoint?
I feel a lot of pressure, but I also feel—weirdly—enormous amounts of freedom because I don’t feel like I’m dealing with legacy characters, which is a lot scarier… I mean, you could not pay me enough money to try to be in the Luke Skywalker timeline. I’m like, “No, thank you!” [Laughs.] It’s just too intense. There’s too much iconography and intensity with those particular characters.
Whereas, I think I’m telling a story that’s more about a timeline we don’t know much about. Let’s hang out here for a little bit and check out what Star Wars looks like when the good guys are actually in charge. What happens? We know what it eventually leads to, so let’s explore. What are the holes that we can poke into what happened?
Can you talk to me about the necessity to grow beyond the Skywalker era?
I mean, it’s such a good question. And I think there are probably people that would disagree with you. There would be people who say, ‘That is Star Wars. Star Wars is the Skywalker saga.’ For someone like myself who was introduced to Star Wars not just through the films, but also through role playing games, I’m also like, ‘You don’t understand what type of escapism this afforded me as a young kid—a kid that did not fit in, that had many, many behavioral problems.’ I was able to escape into that world with my friends, to pretend that I was part of that world. It was not like, ‘And now you have to do a scene from the original movie.’
You could imagine your own scenarios.
My first stabs at writing were writing essentially what you might call Star Wars fan fiction, meaning I would be inspired by [Timothy Zahn’s 1991 Star Wars novel] Heir to the Empire. I’d be inspired by a particular [gaming] session with my friends and then I would go and I’d write. ‘What if my character was also in a different scenario, and what would she do there?’
That to me is the magic of Star Wars. It’s not just the characters. It’s not just that particular monomyth. That is part of it. That is part of the longevity. But it feels like a world so much more so than a story. But I also don’t want to say that and make it sound like it isn’t one of the best stories that our culture has ever produced.
