‘The Acolyte’ Star Amandla Stenberg Breaks Down that Twin Twist: “It’s More Complex Than Just the Light or the Dark”

Disney+‘s new Star Wars show The Acolyte wastes little time unveiling its first major surprise and it’s a doozy. It’s rare plot twist that not only provides the meat of the story, but also exemplifies Star Wars’s long obsession with balancing the Light and the Dark…

**Spoilers for The Acolyte Episodes 1 and 2, now streaming on Disney+**

We learn in the very first episode of The Acolyte that leading lady Amandla Stenberg is actually playing twins. As in two different characters!

Mae is the first twin we meet, the eponymous “acolyte” of a mysterious “Master” of the Dark Side, and it is her mission (and delight) to hunt down four Jedi once stationed on her homeworld of Brendok. However, because Mae has long been assumed dead — the victim of a fire that she started herself as an eight year old girl — blame for her crimes falls upon the adorably awkward shoulders of her long-lost twin sister Osha.

We quickly learn that Osha is a former Jedi Padawan biding her time in the Outer Rim as a “meknek,” a space mechanic tasked with jobs too dangerous for expensive astromech droids like R2-D2. While she placidly goes along with the criminal investigation, she asserts her innocence. It’s only after her penal craft crash lands on a wintery planet that Osha has a Force vision confirming that Mae is not only alive, but clearly the person actually killing Jedi.

It takes a few beats for Mae to convince her former Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) that this is what’s going on, but I figured it out before we even learned Osha once “had” a twin sister. The Osha we meet is so serene compared to the tightly-wound Mae of the show’s cold open, I surmised Stenberg might have been playing two different characters. The Acolyte star is just that good! And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

“Oh, I mean, the performances are beautiful,” Stenberg’s Acolyte co-star Manny Jacinto told Decider. “They’re extraordinary. And it’s no easy feat. Yeah, it’s such a joy watching Amandla take on both roles.”

While the average Star Wars fan might look at Osha and Mae and delineate them into “good” versus “bad” or “Light” versus “Dark,” Stenberg told Decider she had a far more complex view of what separated the twins.

“I think Osha is filled with a lot of inner turmoil and conflict around who she is and what she wants. It’s really confusing for her,” Stenberg said. “Whereas Mae actually has so much more of an established sense of self.”

Stenberg pointed out the end of The Acolyte Episode 2 as an example of Osha’s “internal conflict.” For the first time in sixteen years of believing the other was dead, the sisters see each other in the flesh. Mae is on the run after producing her second “kill,” which is really just giving a guilt-ridden Jedi poison so he can die by suicide. Meanwhile, Osha has teamed up with Sol and fellow Jedi Yord Fandar (Charlie Barnett) and Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen) to capture Mae. Osha has one chance to disarm her sister, but she misses her shot. On purpose? By accident? Stenberg argued the ambiguity of the scene is the point.

“When she fires it, she still isn’t certain, you know? And that lapse, that lapse in time, where she makes that decision is what has always been her weakness, even when she was training as a Padawan,” Stenberg said. “That’s something that I always found really fascinating about her.”

Stenberg went on to describe how she worked closely with The Acolyte’s creator, writer and director Leslye Headland, to explore the “sort of mask or facade” that Osha presents that hides her pain, trauma, and insecurity; feelings which make Osha “unable to connect to herself and connect to the Force.”

Of course, Osha has to don another “mask” in The Acolyte Episode 2 when she pretends to be her sister Mae in order to get intel from her rogue sister’s closest ally, Qimir (Manny Jacinto). However Qimir quickly sees through the ruse thanks what Jacinto described as Osha’s “flustered energy.”

“Amandla does a great job of distinguishing both characters and I think whether it’s me or whether it is Qimir, you know, you can kind of feel that energy switch,” Jacinto said. “So I think it was initially that that kind of tips him off that, ‘Oh, something’s not right.’ And yeah, he kind of calls her out on it. It’s a special moment.”

Stenberg said, with a giggle, “I also just thought it would be funny if Osha was a really bad actor. She’s like a terrible liar, awful actor. That’s how I think I approached it, that scene.”

Of course, Osha might be a “bad actor,” but as of right now, she seems to be Mae’s best job of returning to the Light…a classic Star Wars concept that Stenberg actually pushed against.

“Can Osha bring Mae back to the light? Well, to be honest, I don’t even think of Mae as necessarily just being Sith. I think that there’s a lot of characters in the Star Wars Universe who traverse both the light in the dark,” Stenberg said. “There’s gray Jedi, there’s an entire gray Jedi code. And there are Force users who use it in a different manner.”

“For Mae, well, I think it’s more complex than just the Light or the Dark.”

To uncover why that might be, we’ll just have to keep tuning into new episodes of The Acolyte each Tuesday night from now until July 16.