‘The Acolyte’: Amandla Stenberg Details Intense Training Process
The Acolyte was highlighted in Entertainment Weekly‘s Summer TV Preview, where lead actress Amandla Stenberg discussed their training process for the show, which premieres next month on Disney Plus.
They said the following about their approach to it and how seriously they took it:
“I was such a pain in the ass for producers when I got there. I’m just a really analytical person, and I have to dive deep into everything and gather as many pieces of information as possible in order to not freak out, especially when it comes to taking on something like Star Wars. I remember saying something along the lines of: ‘Well, Hayden Christensen trained for this amount of weeks, and I’m only training for this amount of weeks!’ And they were like, ‘It’s going to be fine. You’re going to work with your master, and it’s going to be okay.’”
Stenberg trained under the guidance of assistant fight coordinator Lu Junchang, and started their martial arts foray by studying Wing Chun. They also spent six weeks on set before cameras started rolling training with stunt doubles Cassie Jo Craig and Kellina Rutherford. Stenberg described their relationship with Junchang as follows:
“It was so rewarding. I’d never really had a relationship to martial arts before, but my master was very patient with me and just a delight. He guided me firmly but with a lot of joy. As we continued filming, I got faster and faster at learning sequences, so by the end of the show, oftentimes I was learning sequences on the spot, and then we would film them. It was incredible for me to acquire that ability.”
Stenberg, a self-professed Star Wars superfan, was excited about the moral and philosophical questions that a story set in this timeline sets up:
“We exist in a period of time before that evil dictatorship takes a hold of the galaxy, so there’s space ideologically to think: What does the world look like before the Force is being utilized in that evil way? What preempts that kind of societal shift?”
The Acolyte will start streaming on Disney Plus on June 4 at 6pm PT / 9pm ET, with the first two episodes. Both of them were directed by Leslye Headland.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
