‘The Acolyte’ Just Got Even More Queer: Dafne Keen Confirms Jecki Lon is Crushing on Amandla Stenberg’s Osha

Disney+‘s new Star Wars series, The Acolyte, takes us back in time to when the Jedi were at their zenith. The Jedi Knights of the High Republic era wear golden tunics, sport multicolored lightsabers, and apparently…flirt? At least, it seems that there’s something of a flirtatious vibe being exchanged between Jedi Padawan Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen) and former Jedi Osha (Amandla Stenberg) in The Acolyte Episode 4.

**Spoilers for The Acolyte Episode 4, now streaming on Disney+**

The Acolyte Episode 4 might end with Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) and his fellow Jedi knights finally facing off with Mae’s (Amandla Stenberg) mysterious Dark Side master, but there’s also a hint that some other action could be on the characters’ minds. That is to say, uh, is something brewing between Sol’s former Padawan, Osha, and his current one, Jecki? Or are the two young females simply forging a friendship based on the shared bond they have as Sol’s Padawan’s?

Is The Acolyte continuing its wonderfully queer agenda by introducing a possible romance between Jecki and Osha??

“I am so happy you asked that because this is my favorite question ever,” The Acolyte star Dafne Keen gushed when Decider asked her just this question last month. “I think, for Jeckie, it’s very confusing because as a Jedi you’re not allowed to have feelings for other people.” 

“Attachments,” Keen’s Acolyte co-star Charlie Barnett clarified.

“And I think… I think she… Hehehe, I think she does,” Keen said. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that, but I think she does.”

Keen went on to say that that the way she played Jecki Lon in The Acolyte Episode 4 was that she “liked” Osha.

“Jeckie’s such a young character. She’s an 18-year-old, but she’s not a normal 18-year-old. Like she hasn’t gone to school and she hasn’t had interactions with other like people,” Keen said. “So it’s her first real experience, I think, of those kinds of feelings and almost the guilt and confusion that comes with it.”

“She’s such a controlled, like self-judging, like perfect student, that I think it’s also almost self-hatred that comes from having those feelings and the kind of constriction, but also the inevitable magnetism that she has towards Osha because of that.”

While Keen said “it was really fun” to play an “uninhibited, younger, more teenage, like imperfectly perfect side of Jeckie,” there was another angle of Jeckie and Osha’s relationship that she enjoyed exploring: an innate sense of competition.

“There’s that kind of almost competition as well, that they’re both Sol’s Padawans,” Keen said. “There’s that the first scene where we meet Jeckie, she’s like, ‘Is that your old Padawan?’ Like there’s this unspoken thing of the competition.”

“But also the magnetism and the friendship that they build and the camaraderie — and the fact that they become a team later — and it was really fun to play with like confusing feelings and we don’t really know ever what it is…But to me, I played it like that.”

We’ll have to wait to see if Jecki’s feelings for Osha are simply in the subtext, but Dafne Keen at least is rooting for a Jecki/Osha romance.