“She was doing really well, he cheated, and she took the death with no anger and with grace.”
Spoilers ahead for episode five of The Acolyte.
The Acolyte is racking up quite the body count. The latest Star Wars series, created by Leslye Headland, began with the death of Carrie-Anne Moss’s Jedi master, and in subsequent episodes Jedi have been dropping like mere stormtroopers. And yet last week’s fifth episode, which saw the deaths of not one but two major characters — including the best Padawan of the High Republic era — still came as a surprise.
Dafne Keen, who broke out playing a young clone of Wolverine in 2017’s Logan, traded her claws for a lightsaber to play The Acolyte’s Jecki Lon, Padawan to Jedi Master Sol (Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae). While attempting to prevent the murder of another Jedi master, Jecki and Sol come face-to-face with a terrifying masked Sith Lord, whose identity Jecki manages to reveal following an intense duel with this much more seasoned warrior. But then Qimir (Manny Jacinto) pulls out a second lightsaber and kills the young Padawan, and soon after he kills another young Jedi knight, Charlie Barnett’s Yord. It’s a shocking moment that Keen says speaks to the central tension of The Acolyte: Jecki had so much potential, and it all disappeared in the flash of a red lightsaber.
Seeing you playing another badass girl with spiky parts felt very natural. Did you see parallels between X-23 and Jecki?
I always enjoy playing the trope of cub and lonely older man. That’s a fun thing to play, especially when you work with such talented actors like Lee Jung-jae and Hugh Jackman. They’re such different characters, but you can find their humanity. They’re both almost orphaned.
You mention their humanity — did you feel alien in the costume and all the makeup?
It was very weird. I didn’t really feel like an alien; I felt very much like myself until I would see playback and then I would look completely different. It was interesting to figure out how to act with a completely new face.
Wookieepedia says Jecki is half-human. How much of her backstory and origin did you know? Was it written out for you as reference material, or did you concoct your own?
It was very much created by Leslye and then she gave me a lot of freedom to create more backstory. We talked about it a lot. Jecki was a very talented Jedi who went into the Order at 2 or 3 years old — really young — and was a standout in her classes. Sol, who is really picky with his Padawans, picked her because she reminded him of Osha, since they were both prodigies. I hope you can see that in the fighting in the fifth episode, because it is rare for a Padawan to be that talented in combat and we wanted to show that through that incredible fight scene.
We devised that she tried to become a Jedi knight at the same time as Yord and got told that it was arrogant to think that she could make knight that young — but that she did have the talent to do it. That was a bit of the dynamic with Yord: that they’d done the trials together, and he’d been doing them for years, and this 18-year-old did it with him.
That speaks to some of the bad-faith criticism of this show. Not that you should be in a position to refute all of it, but one line I’ve seen has been people complaining that a Padawan can go toe-to-toe with a Sith Lord. I wasn’t bothered by that at all — Obi-Wan was a Padawan when he beat Darth Maul, and Jecki ultimately does lose and die. You seem to be offering even more of an explanation, in that she wasn’t just any Padawan.
It’s very funny for me to see that because you see Anakin being extremely talented; you see Obi-Wan being extremely talented; you see Ahsoka being extremely talented. Within Star Wars history, we’ve seen it so many times. The point of what we were trying to get across in that fight was how much potential she had as a Jedi and as a fighter. The reason why she wasn’t a knight was because she lacked experience, and a more experienced Jedi would’ve known that a Sith plays dirty and a Sith will pull out a dagger that’s hidden in his saber. She wouldn’t have expected that because she was very good at combat within a training circuit, not in actual battle with an actual Sith.
Did you play her as a child, or an adult with her own agency? Because the nature of the Jedi — especially the ethics of the Padawan system — is a big focus of the show. Sol sends her into battle but is shocked when she’s killed because she’s “just a child.”
I played her as my own age, which is very confusing because legally Jecki would be an adult. I was 18 when I was playing her; we all imagined her to be the same age as me. But it’s such an arbitrary thing to say one day you’re a child and the next day you’re an adult. I think that’s what Sol meant by that. She hadn’t had a lot of life experience outside of the Jedi temple. Especially for someone as grown-up as Sol is, 18 years old is a child. And to Qimir, she was a child. It’s more the sentimentality of how brutal it is to murder an 18-year-old, especially to someone who has lived a life and had more experiences.
You said in another interview that you’d played Jecki as though she had a crush on Osha. Can you elaborate on that? Is some part of that coming from Jecki meeting a peer outside of the Jedi Order for the first time?
It was so interesting to play that because of how different that relationship could have been. Jecki could have been jealous of Osha and felt threatened by her, but instead she was fascinated by someone so similar to her. Someone who was Sol’s Padawan, someone who was really talented like she was and who decided to leave — that’s completely new to her. Jecki has lived in the Jedi temple and hasn’t had outside real-life experiences. She didn’t have a family because she left at, like, 3, so she doesn’t have Osha’s experiences with her sister and her mothers. She finds Osha so fascinating, and she’s kind of in awe of her. She’s just figuring out what she feels for Osha, and I played that as having a crush on her. It comes mainly out of fascination and that confusion that comes when you like someone, especially when you’re queer: I don’t know if this is a friend or if I’m into them. Then add the layer of her having also been Sol’s Padawan: Am I jealous of her? Do I want to be like her? Do I want to date her? Jecki’s never experienced any attraction to anyone before, so she doesn’t know how this works. It felt like an innocent little crush.
Yord’s death was a real surprise because I thought it would just be you, not two major-character deaths in quick succession. How did you and Charlie feel about your character deaths coming one right after the other?
We were so excited about dying. It’s so rare to find a director and writer who will go there. So many people nowadays won’t kill their characters — or will kill them and bring them back to life and be very cheeky about it. It’s so bold of Leslye to have created these wonderful, full characters that she then just kills off. It feels so real — unfair, sudden. It raises the stakes. And you want stakes. You want danger in something like Star Wars. It’s not “Look how scary this bad guy is, but he’s not going to kill anyone.” It’s much more terrifying and impressive if the bad guy does kill everyone within the first episode of meeting him. And also, on an ego level, it was just really fun to play a cool character who goes out in style.
Do you think Osha was wrong to stop Sol from killing an unarmed Qimir when he had the chance, even if it was against the Jedi code?
You don’t want to go to his level. It’s good to take the high road. Whether that in the long run is bad for the story or good for the story, I’ll let the viewers decide. But morally I agree with not killing someone who has killed, because then you’re a killer, too.
I couldn’t help but notice that Sol just leaves your body behind. Was that actually you on set playing dead for that, and how did you feel about Jecki and Yord just being left out to rot?
It was me and Charlie playing dead. We had a whole day of just lying on the ground, which was really funny. It’s savage that Sol left us, but it’s such a moment of adrenaline where he’s not thinking about those kinds of things. He had such bigger fish to fry. Also, to the Jedi, people are energy, and he knows that Jecki and Yord are one with the Force now, so their bodies are the least of his concerns.
How do you look at Jecki’s story? Is it a tragedy, in that her life was cut down so quickly? Was she an ideal Jedi and this is what Jedi are supposed to be?
It’s definitely a tragedy, especially because of how young she was. That exchange that Sol and Qimir have where he says, “She was a child,” and he says, “You brought her here,” kind of explains everything you need to know. Jecki’s death is completely symbolic and moves the story so far forward. It gives the characters motivation to keep fighting, and so does Yord’s death.
And in a really beautiful way, Jecki dies as a Jedi knight. She made it to knight. She was on a mission; she died fighting a noble cause, fighting a Sith. She was doing really well, he cheated, and she took the death with no anger and with grace. As she says herself, it’s always a beautiful thing to watch anything or anyone become one with the Force. She had that happen to her.
Did you get to choose the lightsaber color for her? What would you pick?
No, man, we all got given our colors. We all asked for colors, and no one listened to us. I think everyone would say they want purple, but I loved the green, like Jecki had. It feels right with my energy and feels right with Jecki’s energy. But I would like to have two sabers, for sure.
