Star Wars: The Acolyte Costume Designer Jennifer Bryan Wants You To Pay Attention To Background Characters

There’s a new episode of Star Wars: The Acolyte streaming every week on Disney+, and the new series takes place in the franchise’s High Republic era. In honor of the new show, ComicBook recently had the chance to chat with costume designer, Jennifer Bryan, who spoke about designing looks for the time period, which is about 100 years before the events of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Bryan also revealed some of her favorite looks from the season and shared that she’s very proud of the costumes she created for the background actors, especially in two of the show’s locations.

“[Another favorite], which is actually the collective, not an individual costume, is the collective of many of the background pieces, especially on the island of Ueda when Mae first comes in,” Bryan explained. “So, [episodes] one and two, these two places. She goes such a track down Torbin, where she goes to get a poison in this very busy kind of marketplace, and you don’t see tight closeups, but you see enough of that and that collective of that community. There’s some really wonderful pieces there.”

Jennifer Bryan Talks Mae’s Assassin Look:

Bryan also talked more about how much she likes Mae’s assassin look. 

“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.” 

What Is The Acolyte About?

Set during The High Republic, Star Wars: The Acolyte delivers an investigation into a mysterious string of crimes, which pits a Jedi master against his former apprentice in a race to uncover the truth. The more that the pair learn about the situation, the darker their journey becomes, as they confront things that darker than either of them could have imagined.

The series stars Amandla Stenberg, Lee Jung-jae, Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Charlie Barnett, Jodie Turner-Smith, Rebecca Henderson, Dean-Charles Chapman, Joonas Suotamo, and Carrie-Anne Moss.

Stay tuned for more from our interview with Jennifer Bryan. The first three episodes of Star Wars: The Acolyte are now streaming on Disney+ with the third episode scheduled to drop on Tuesday, June 18th.