Leslye Headland’s Star Wars Series Revealed
Leslye Headland is bringing her talents to Star Wars with The Acolyte.
Leslye Headland was rumored to be working on a Star Wars feature film but that was quickly revealed to be a new series for Disney+ earlier this year. Now, with the onslaught of the Disney Investor Day announcements, we have learned that the show will be called The Acolyte and what we have learned about its story has us deeply intrigued at what the show means for the future of the Star Wars universe.
The Leslye Headland show is being sold by Disney as a mystery-thriller that will be set during the final days of the High Republic era. It will also focus on “emerging dark-side powers” and that has led many fans to speculate that we could be seeing more elements of past established lore make their way into the proper Star Wars canon. At the very least, it seems like The Acolyte could offer fans their first official Star Wars project that specifically focuses on the Sith Order and a Dark Jedi protagonist.
Whatever the case may be, the inclusion of Leslye Headland as the main creative force behind The Acolyte is what has so many fans intensely curious about this particular project. She was the creator of the truly mind-bending and totally unique Netflix series Russian Doll, as well as a staff writer on the truly underloved FX series Terriers. Her particular sense of humor is what a lot of fans expected her to bring to Star Wars, and that could certainly still be the case, but this first tease of The Acolyte looks to paint it as something much darker and serious.
That is not to say that Leslye Headland is a stranger to darker and more straight-faced subject matter. Of all the Star Wars projects that Disney announced during their Investor Day 2020 video, The Acolyte certainly sounds like it has the potential to be the darkest of them all. Setting during the final days of the High Republic and acknowledging that the show will focus on the rise of the dark side has definitely painted it as a potentially grim riff on the Star Wars universe.
What might be the most exciting about Leslye Headland’s involvement is the idea that she will be getting to craft a mystery-thriller in the world of Star Wars. It is the kind of story that we have not really seen played out to its fullest in the mainstream Star Wars releases. Will The Acolyte be a murder mystery? Could it give audiences their first real detective story in a mainstream Star Wars project? This kind of possibility is extremely intriguing.
Whatever The Acolyte ends up being, it is thrilling to hear that Leslye Headland will be getting to play in the Star Wars sandbox. Her singular take on storytelling is going to be fascinating to see applied to the fantastical world of Star Wars. We don’t have a release date yet for The Acolyte, but as soon as we know more about this project, we will be sure to update you.
