Amandla Stenberg Unleashes The Dark Side
The actor unpacks The Acolyte’s emotional season finale and speculates on where Osha and Mae could go in Season 2.
For an actor, there are few things more challenging than playing identical twins. Nicolas Cage once said that while portraying both Charlie and Donald Kaufman in Adaptation, “I literally wanted to scream. And then, in fact, did scream.” A young Lindsay Lohan joked that the hardest part of filming The Parent Trap was “remembering both lines.” Now, Star Wars has its first identical twins. Sort of.
In the latest Star Wars show, The Acolyte, Amandla Stenberg portrays one Force-sensitive person literally split in two thanks to a powerful “vergence” in the Force. This gave the actor the opportunity to play their characters (Mae and Osha) as two halves of a whole, culminating in a stunning mirror-image fight scene and a whole lot of soul searching.
“There was always kind of a confrontation of self,” Stenberg tells Inverse of the show’s emotionally fraught Season 1 finale.
To prepare for The Acolyte, the actor went all-in on building a backstory for each character, tracing their respective journeys from childhood into adulthood in a process that showrunner Leslye Headland actively encouraged.
“Leslye gave me so much creative freedom to imagine what their lives had been like up until the point that we meet them,” Stenberg says. “So it did become like a 50-page extravaganza.”
They even crafted unique playlists to get into the right mindsets for both Osha and Mae. (One features Erykah Badu, the other MF Doom, but you’ll have to keep reading to find out which.)
The Acolyte finale finally reunites the twins... only to drive them apart again.
The Acolyte series hasn’t yet gotten the green light for Season 2, but Stenberg seems to be enjoying the downtime either way. If The Acolyte gets to continue its story, they’re certainly ready to jump back in — just don’t ask them what to expect from Mae and Osha’s future. “That’s a whole other can of worms,” Stenberg laughs.
While we wait for The Acolyte to get that coveted Season 2 order, Stenberg sits down with Inverse to discuss Osha and Mae’s emotional journeys, the twins’ big switcheroo, and the anime that helped the actor get into their heads.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Osha finally embraces the dark in The Acolyte’s last episode. What’s next for the character?
I’ve been so in awe of your performance throughout the season, but the finale absolutely blew me away. Talk to me about filming that big fight between Osha and Mae. What was going through your head throughout?
It was so much fun. It felt like it was a culmination of all of the work I’d been doing over the months of filming. We had so much to film for the finale and we didn’t have that much time to work through all the stunt choreography, but I had gotten fast enough that I could learn things really quickly and then perform them. That was just so gratifying. I didn’t know that I could grow into that kind of stunt performer.
Something our stunt supervisor, Chris Cowan, was so fantastic at was always maintaining the emotional arc and narrative of the stunt choreography. Osha finally has this opportunity to express herself emotionally — express pain, express rage — while Mae, who has been operating from that place that whole season really has to field her sister’s emotions while trying to placate the situation and not allow it to progress further. There’s this flip-flopping, which was really gratifying for me, having gone through their emotional arcs for months.
Training for The Acolyte’s big finale was “gratifying” for Stenberg: “I didn’t know that I could grow into that kind of stunt performer.”
I love what you said about this emotional release, because you don’t want to see Sol go out the way that he does… but for me, seeing a Black character get to unleash and heal in this dark, cathartic way was gratifying in itself.
Yes! I’m so happy to hear that.
What was it like trying to build up to that arc: going down this “evil” path but framing it as this very healing moment?
It kind of felt like I had to emotionally edge Osha for months and not allow her that sort of release. [Laughs] So when we finally arrived to the finale and she had all of these opportunities to do that, it did feel so good. Often throughout filming, I thought about my relationship to myself, especially because I was playing twins — or as Sol reveals in the finale, basically the same person, but split into two different bodies. There was always kind of a confrontation of self happening for me, and I think I identified with Osha more.
“It all comes out in a very tragic, Dark-sided way.”
Osha’s narrative arc was so satisfying for me to be able to move through. Her journey is really just about emotional repression and feeling beholden to these larger institutions or opinions about who she should be — repressing her emotions, not connecting fully to herself, not moving through pain in a healthy way — until it spills over and she finally has this opportunity to be embodied and to release her trauma, and it all comes out in a very tragic, Dark-sided way, literally. But there’s something very beautiful about it, too, so I was so excited to arrive there.
You’re very much breaking a generational curse, because Sol is the same way. Osha was following his lead, keeping all her emotions tamped down, but the finale is her finally saying, “No.”
Exactly, yeah! I think about that so often, how our generation is tasked with that responsibility to move through pain and trauma in a different way than our parents or our grandparents. It’s something that me and Leslye talked about a lot, and it really is the emotional core of the show. It’s a family drama about misunderstanding and judgment and pain and mistakes and processing those in a healthy way — or processing them in a way that breeds even more pain.
The Acolyte frames Osha’s dark side turn as a chance to finally heal from past trauma, a first for the franchise.
Leslye Headland has mentioned Kill Bill, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Fight Club as inspiration for the show’s big moment. But were there any films or characters that you two discussed as inspiration for Osha and Mae as individuals?
Oh yeah, totally. I mean, we discovered very early into our relationship that Kill Bill is one of our favorite movies and we all watched it together when we arrived to London, the whole cast and crew. We talked about Seven Samurai. I think I brought Junji Ito, one of my favorite manga artists, into the mix. I watched Black Swan. And I also rewatched Perfect Blue, since Black Swan is low-key an adaptation of Perfect Blue. There were a lot of anime influences for both of us. We’re both big lovers of anime, and I think that was part of why Kill Bill also felt very influential, too.
I read that you also had playlists for Osha and Mae.
Oh, my God, I’m dead. [Laughs]
Could you shed a little light on what music you were listening to, to get into their heads?
For Mae, I was leaning more into her emotionality. Because they’re, in my eyes, the same person split into two different bodies, I wanted them ideologically to be the opposite. I have “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer on Mae’s playlist. I also have “The Healer” by Erykah Badu. I listened to that song maybe 50 times while I was writing her backstory. And then for Osha, I was kind of going for an Aphex Twin, sort of more logic-brained type of soundtrack. I have a lot of Aphex Twin — and I have “Space Ho’s Coast to Coast” by Madlib and MF Doom. I think that was because of Osha’s sort of “mechanic swagger,” if you want to call it that.
Osha starts off as fairly analytical — but embracing the dark side will allow her to access more emotions in the future.
You mentioned working on Osha and Mae’s backstory.
Oh, man. Yeah. I did have a whole book because, well, one, I was very daunted with the idea of playing two different characters. Something that I feel like we don’t really talk about that much is when you’re filming something, you shoot out of sequence, so one of the most challenging things for me is always just ensuring that I am accurate within the emotional arc when we’re filming things out of order. Knowing I was going to be doing it for two different people, I was like, “I’ve got to have a binder for this.”
I do much better work when I have a deep sense of the life of the person that I’m playing. So I was going to just write up a quick backstory, and then I was like, “We have to get into this, girls. It’s the only way that I’m going to know who these people are.” And Leslye gave me so much creative freedom to imagine what their lives had been like up until the point that we meet them, so it did become like a 50-page extravaganza.
The Acolyte essentially “resets” both Osha and Mae in different ways: “That’s such a fun, expansive, creative choice that Leslye made.”
With the twins where they are in the finale, what do you hope to explore when — I’m going to say “when” — you get a Season 2?
The sliver of Osha’s life that we get to see in the season really tracks her sort of emotional repression, and then the relinquishing of that and the release from that. I get so excited at the idea of potentially being able to explore an Osha who is embodied and has changed this attitude that she has towards her own feelings or what she’s allowed to express. She could be a very powerful person being free of that mentality.
“Leslye is really wonderful at creating both heroes and villains who can feel three-dimensional and experience emotional retribution.”
With Mae, I mean, that’s a whole other can of worms because her memory just got wiped. We’ve spoken about all kinds of fun stuff. Was Mae’s memory actually wiped? How did tidbits come back to her? What would it be like to play someone who is struggling with memory and someone who has been reverted back to a childlike state, really? There’s still a warrior in her somewhere. That’s something I wouldn’t even be able to begin to map out because it would just be so contingent on the decisions we would make, because that’s just such a fun, expansive, creative choice that Leslye made.
Stenberg invoked classic Star Wars characters like Princess Leia and Padmé Amidala on the Acolyte press tour.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up your looks throughout the press tour. You cosplayed for Star Wars Celebration last year. All of your premiere looks were so incredible. It was so thrilling to see someone that looks like me taking up space within this universe in that way. But I’m curious how your relationship with the universe and even the fandom has changed by prepping for this role and experience.
Oh, man. That means so much to me, and I can literally go about the rest of my life now just knowing how somebody feels that way because that really is all that it’s about.
I have been such a deep lover of fantasy and sci-fi for as long as I can remember, since when I started reading really. I always desperately hoped and wished for these kinds of characters in sci-fi, just because sci-fi is such a powerful genre when it comes to exploring identity and politics and spirituality. This experience has been transformative and challenging for me in ways I anticipated, and in ways I never could have anticipated. It’s really forced me, in this sort of ironic way, to think deeper about the morality that is explored in Star Wars.
Star Wars is this sort of interesting cosmic thing. It’s like a network of ideas that’s contributed to by so many different people and yet always maintains the same ethos. It also encapsulates and can be very representative of the things happening in the world, both in its narrative storytelling and the way people respond to it. And so it’s been fascinating for me, honestly. It’s been hard at times and it’s been joyful at other times. It’s been so multifaceted, but the goal has always been to make people feel seen and heard in it. And I think Leslye is really wonderful at creating both heroes and villains who can feel three-dimensional and experience emotional retribution.
I don’t know. I watched the finale with my niece and nephew the other day. My nephew was holding my hand, and my niece was like, “I want Mae’s hair,” and my nephew was like, “I want Osha’s hair,” and I was like, “This is exactly what I was hoping for.” So at the end of the day, it’s been a wild ride. It’s challenged me immensely and in incredible ways, it’s taught me so much about myself. I’m just happy that the kids get to have it.
