Join the stunt team behind the scenes to dig into an epic Wookiee Jedi lightsaber clash, the Khofar forest massacre, and more.
There’s an elegance to the brutality at play in the lightsaber battle that leads to the Stranger’s unmasking in episode 5 of The Acolyte, “Night.”
Editor's note: This article discusses story details and spoilers from The Acolyte episode 5, “Night,” and episode 7, “Choice,” as well as previous episodes in the series. All episodes are now streaming only on Disney+!
From the start of the battle, we’re thrust into the clashing sabers of the visiting Jedi on Khofar meeting the masked foe in the forest. Each moment had to be carefully choreographed and shot in a way to accentuate the ferocity and peril for the characters while keeping the production perfectly safe for the dedicated cast members and stunt doubles. The shoot was the culmination of months of training and careful planning all leading up to one heartbreaking moment.
“I came up with this shot reveal where Jecki is right in front and you just see these three sabers sort of poke holes through her,” action director Christopher Clark Cowan reveals. “And we cut to Jecki like ‘What just happened?’ And she wipes and reveals Manny [Jacinto as the Stranger] for the first time in all his evil glory. Goosebumps, for sure, when that moment happens.”
Several members of the stunt team behind The Acolyte’s kung fu-inspired fight sequences got their start working together to choreograph the moves of another famous dark sider: Darth Vader.
Mark Ginther, the series’ stunt coordinator, and Cowan were part of the team envisioning the Sith Lord’s legendary hallway massacre near the end of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, alongside choreographer Guillermo Grispo. “Guillermo was adamant, as we all were, that we couldn't just do things with Vader that hadn't been really seen before. You couldn't fight like he was in the prequels,” Cowan tells StarWars.com. “We still wanted to keep Vader's heavy swings, his anger, his aggression and really just show him in the coolest way possible.”
The team continued to work together on Solo: A Star Wars Story and action films outside of the galaxy far, far away before coming together to help realize The Acolyte creator Leslye Headland’s vision for a new kind of Star Wars prequel, set roughly 100 years before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in a time of peace.
Recently, StarWars.com sat down with Ginther, Cowan, and assistant fight coordinator and stunt choreographer Lu Junchang, who also serves as Jacinto’s stunt double on the series, to discuss several key moments in the series so far — including putting a lightsaber in the furry hands of a Wookiee Jedi.
Study for a noodle bar fight
From the start, it was essential that the crew help series stars Amandla Stenberg and Jacinto, among others, define their fighting style to uniquely incorporate the character, performer, and storyline into each high kick and lightsaber clash. “Leslye loves it. She's a Star Wars geek, of course, and she loves kung fu fighting,” says Ginther.
“The first thing that Leslye said to me when I met her is that she wanted to incorporate a lot of wushu and kung fu and samurai flair into the action of The Acolyte,” Cowan adds. “And as soon as she said those three things, my face lit up because my dream is to direct martial arts.”
“She wanted a mixture of these different styles,” Ginther continues. “We needed to bring out a separate fighting style in Mae and Osha,” — both characters played by Stenberg. “Mae moves like a tiger,” Junchang adds.
“Mae's fighting style is very direct, very erratic, very ‘I will cut somebody,’” Cowan says. “She doesn't care about the subtleties. She's just going to run straight at her opponent and start throwing hands.”
For the first sequence in the series, a bold cold open pitting Mae against Jedi Master Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss) in a raucous fight inside a noodle bar, the stunt crew incorporated an homage to Kill Bill in the choreography then dug into the psychology behind each character’s tactics. “Leslye definitely wanted to try something different with this opening fight in that it's primarily hand to hand. That's something that we really don't get to see the Jedi or Force sensitives or Sith show off,” Cowan says. “Indara and Sol sort of have a similar approach in that they try to de-escalate the situation. They're not just going to whip out their lightsabers.”
As the fight unfolds, amid flying tables and knives leaving patrons running for cover, Mae and Indara are both trying to size up their opponents. Each moment was plotted out months in advance of the shoot, using digital pre-visualization and motion capture technology over the course of a week from Ginther’s studio in Los Angeles. “Indara is fully on the defensive, studying [Mae],” Cowan says. “And it was important to show Mae testing Indara in her own way, so that you don't really understand until the end that she's just making sure that Indara’s always going to do the right thing. Mae uses that to her advantage to take out her first Jedi, albeit still not in the way that she wanted to. She did take a name off her list.”
The scene was a full-circle moment for Cowan in particular, who started out at 11 using his family’s camcorder to make home movies with his action figures and graduated to fan films posted online when he moved to LA after college. “Back in college, the first fan films I was doing were for The Matrix in 2002 with my friends and putting them online for fun. The fact that I even got to work with Carrie-Anne Moss on this, and direct action with her, is still mind blowing to me. It doesn't make sense. Absolutely insane.”
“She worked her damnedest with the shorter period of time to learn the saber and the moves,” Ginther adds of Moss’ performance. “She didn't have a real long, extended, training period like we normally do, but she did really well with it.”
Kung fu master
Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) is another series standout, both with his ability to convey his character’s interior journey through subtle mannerisms and his many on-screen battle sequences. “We made him a kung fu master, so he moves really naturally,” Junchang says, with the calm presence befitting a Jedi Master.
The first time we see Sol fight Mae on Olega, it’s clear he’s a tactician and a skilled warrior, capable of disarming the assassin and knocking her off guard. “When Leslye came to us with the script, what we were trying to do is make sure that we were telling the story of a teacher and a student,” Ginther says. Although Sol previously taught Mae’s twin, Osha, the fighter before him is still very much learning her craft. “He wasn't being as aggressive because he taught her sister when she was younger.”
But the team still worked hard to make the fight feel kinetic and dangerous. “When Mae is fighting Sol she does that high flip kick and it's very difficult to land,” Ginther says. “We have to do that over and over again on the day and Chris will shoot it in a way that we know that we can make it as dangerous as possible so you feel that energy, but make it safe [in reality].”
Stenberg trained hard to perform many of her own stunts, with a heightened curiosity about why her character would make specific decisions in the heat of the moment. “If there's a reason, she wants to know why she's doing it,” Ginther says. “Amandla came in and she gave us a book. She wrote a thick book of each character and what her mind was. So it helped us to go, ‘We understand this is what she's thinking.’”
Two against one
Moving into the pivotal Jedi battle sequence in episode 5, the stunt team knew their work would take the spotlight that week. “I remember the first time I saw the outline and the briefing for episode five,” Cowan says, a shocking turn of events that reminded him of a pivotal episode in Game of Thrones. “This is our Red Wedding. It’s nuts.”
For his part, Jacinto trained so vigorously for the Stranger’s transformation that it was difficult for Junchang to continue to match his physical look over the months of production — including, yes, his well-toned arms. “He had a physical transformation from when he first showed up to when you start to see his arms,” Ginther recalls. “I was like, ‘Hello, Lu? You gotta start working out.’
“This is something we were looking forward to from the beginning: a lightsaber sequence that was going to blow people away,” Ginther adds. “Chris was super excited about it.”
Cowan enjoyed playing with the idea of the Stranger’s gauntlet and helmet, pieces of armor fashioned from cortosis and able to disrupt the Jedi’s abilities and sabers. Taking inspiration from the duel of the fates sequence in The Phantom Menace, pitting Obi-Wan Kenobi and his Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, against Darth Maul, Cowan created moments for Jecki Lon and her Master, Sol, to work together to try to best the Stranger. “I really wanted that to come alive, especially when Jecki and Sol team up against him. I really wanted that to be the whole theme of what was there on camera the entire time,” Cowan says. “They do not let up, one after the other, one after the other, sometimes at the same time. Clearly, Master Sol is a beast with a lightsaber, and in my own personal headcanon, his Padawan is going to absorb all of that and more.” Cowan pitched Headland on Jecki’s double lightsaber moment, the chance to showcase the Padawans’ genius just before her tragic end. “If she were, for some reason, going to live past her prime, she would have been insane. So I really wanted that to come through.”
A Wookiee with a lightsaber
In the latest episode, we got a different kind of pay off: another perspective on the fateful altercation on Brendok with the Wookiee Jedi Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo) finally igniting his own lightsaber. “That was a fun one and also a tricky one to figure out,” Cowan says. “You have to take into account just the sheer strength of a Wookiee that would be behind his strikes with a saber. You can't really just have a straight clash with a Wookiee because he's going to knock you off balance. His saber is going to hit like a truck.”
Suotamo, who previously played Han Solo’s co-pilot Chewbacca among other roles, was ecstatic to get his first saber and the chance to perform the fight sequence that went with the Jedi weapon. “We didn't have a double for him, so Joonas came in and worked hard. That was all him,” Ginther says, with help from Neal Scanlan’s creature department to make the costume more breathable for the tremendous physicality. “ I think, when it comes down to it, a lot of people are going to look at the Wookiees a lot differently after this.”
“We really wanted him to be a bit more wild and more animalistic in his approach,” Cowan adds. “I'd imagine if we saw Kelnacca fight in his own Jedi mind, he would use his strength, but it would be a bit more clean. But because the witches are inside his mind and bringing out his primal instincts, his form isn't going to be immaculate. It's not going to be perfectly precise. It's going to be swinging wildly to take out whatever is in front of him, no matter the cost. And Joonas absolutely brought that to life. It was so cool to finally see him have a lightsaber!
“And as much fun as it was creating Wookiee Jedi-versus-Jedi action, we're so hyped to show you what's coming in episode eight,” Cowan teases. “I can't really say any more than that.”
