Star Wars: The Acolyte Surprises Fans With Secret Character

Set more than a century before the other Star Wars movies and shows, Star Wars: The Acolyte is able to operate with a bit more creative freedom than some of its peers. Fans don’t know any of these characters or storylines, which allows Leslye Headland’s new Disney+ series to keep folks guessing. The very first episode of the series, which is now available on Disney+, proves that there will be plenty of twists. The Acolyte‘s trailers and clips were all hiding one massive secret, an additional character revealed in the very first episode that flips the entire story upside down.

WARNING: This article contains MAJOR SPOILERS for the premiere of Star Wars: The Acolyte! Continue reading at your own risk…

The trailers for The Acolyte featured a lot of footage of the show’s main character, a hooded and sometimes masked Force-user played by Amandla Stenberg. This character was clearly at odds with the Jedi and the trailers didn’t reveal why. That reason still hasn’t come into focus just yet, but the premiere of The Acolyte did deliver quite a twist when revealing that Stenberg is actually playing two different characters.

That Force-user, Mae, is wanted for the murder of a Jedi. A young mechanic named Osha, who once trained as a Jedi padawan but has since left the Order, looks just like Mae and is brought in for questioning. But it doesn’t take long before we learn that Mae and Osha are actually twin sisters. Both women thought her sister had died back on their home planet when they were young, so neither was aware that the other still existed.

Mae and Osha are the center of the story in The Acolyte, as both explore the Force in different ways. This could lead to even more confusion for other characters going forward, trying to figure out which one is responsible for various acts. It also means Stenberg is pulling double duty, starring as not just one lead character in a Star Wars show, but two.

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. The first two episodes of Star Wars: The Acolyte are now streaming on Disney+.