Star Wars: The Acolyte Costume Designer Jennifer Bryan Breaks Down Osha and Mae's Distinct Styles
Jennifer Bryan talks about collaborating with Leslye Headland on The Acolyte.
Star Wars: The Acolyte debuted on Disney+ this week, and the show's first episode revealed that Amandla Stenberg was portraying twins named Osha and Mae. Osha is a former Jedi padawan who left the order to work as a meknek. Osha is drawn back into an adventure with her former Jedi brethren after being accused of murder. Turns out, the crime was committed by Osha's sister who she believed to be dead. ComicBook recently had the chance to chat with The Acolyte's costume designer, Jennifer Bryan, who spoke about creating distinct looks for Osha and Mae.
"So what I had to do is very consciously treat them as if there were two different performers," Bryan explained. "That helped me a lot in keeping that differentiation as I designed and created and started to put this look together. It was very unique because I've never really had that experience before where an actress is playing two characters and they're like two mirror images of themselves."
"But we were again, guided so wonderfully, my lack of words here because it sort of overtakes me the way [series creator Leslye Headland] was," she continued. "She's such a great collaborator and exchanger of ideas ... Sometimes some directors are very, not that it's a bad thing, but they can be very finite in their ideas and therefore it may not give you as much room as you'd like to give them some other things to explore. She was the opposite. She was all about exploration, about what I thought and why."
"I was always making sure I was able to justify to her why I wanted to go this direction for Osha versus that direction for Mae."
Jennifer Bryan Talks Mae's Assassin Look:
We also asked Bryan her favorite look created for The Acolyte, and she had three answers, starting with Mae's assassin garb.
"I would say Mae-assassin was my favorite because it brought a very unique set of materials and design approach that we hadn't seen in Star Wars before," Bryan shared. "So even though Star Wars from George Lucas's time has some Samurai references, and you can see it in her breastplate where the bamboo, that's technically Samurai used bamboo in their breastplates because it's a very strong material."
"Then I did something else," she continued. "I introduced chain mail, which is from a completely different warrior culture, but a very old culture, but it's used for protection ... I would say, it would be the icon stamp of my designs for the show for that reason."
Stay tuned for more from our interview with Jennifer Bryan. The first two episodes of Star Wars: The Acolyte are now streaming on Disney+ with the third episode scheduled to drop on Tuesday, June 11th.
