Breakout star of one of television’s best comedy’s of the last decade The Good Place, Manny Jacinto has recently been popping up in major properties like Top Gun: Maverick and a favourite to be primed to be snatched up by a franchise. And now according to Deadline, he’s joining the Star Wars universe in Leslye Headland’s The Acolyte.
Jacinto joins. along Lee Jung-Jae (Squid Game), Amandla Sternberg (Bodies Bodies Bodies) and Jodie Turner-Smith (After Yang) in the killer cast, which is really stacking up and now one of the most anticipated projects coming to Disney+. Headland has been a filmmaker on the rise for since her work on Russian Doll, and serves as the director, writer, executive producer, and showrunner of The Acolyte.
Lucasfilm describes the series in official Star Wars press releases as a “mystery thriller” that is reportedly going to focus on Dark Side Force users in the Old Republic. In an interview on May 17, Headland revealed it takes place about 100 years before The Phantom Menace. “A lot of those characters haven’t even been born yet,” she said. “We’re taking a look at the political and personal and spiritual things that came up in a time period that we don’t know much about. My question when watching The Phantom Menace was always like, ‘Well, how did things get to this point?’ How did we get to a point where a Sith lord can infiltrate the Senate and none of the Jedi pick up on it? Like, what went wrong? What are the scenarios that led us to this moment?”
There’s no release date as of yet, but The Acolyte is expected to drop sometime in 2023.
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