Daredevil and After Yang Directors Joining Star Wars to Helm The Acolyte Episodes

The latest Star Wars show to enter production is being directed by a pair of familiar faces. Tuesday, it was revealed Kogonada (After Yang) and Alex Garcia Lopez (Daredevil) are joining The Acolyte series creator Leslye Headland as directors on the series, which is currently shooting principal photography in the United Kingdom. 

Kogonada’s television resume is rather light, though the filmmaker has become a favorite thanks to A24’s wildly popular After Yang, which won some hefty awards on the film festival circuit. Lopez may be best known around these parts for helming the fourth episode in Daredevil Season 3, an episode in which the filmmaker shot an 11-minute one-take fight sequence, one of the most lauded moments ever filmed for a Marvel series. The news was first reported by Discussing Film.

When does The Acolyte take place?

The Acolyte will be the first Lucasfilm project outside of publishing to explore the High Republic, an era of time where it’s relatively peaceful in the galaxy and the Sith are nothing more than legend. Headland has said she wanted to explore the last years of the quiet time before the resurgence of the Sith in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. It’s estimated the series will likely be set around 200 years before the events of the prequel.

“The truth is that I, as a major mega fan, came to them with this idea. And I said, ‘I think the best place to put this is in an era you guys have not quite explored yet,’” Headland revealed to Vanity Fair last 
year. “They were very enthusiastic. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to explore that [existing] world, but I think that they already were because The Mandalorian and a lot of the other television projects were really relying on legacy characters.”

She continued, “I was coming at it as a fan who was much more into the RPG that the Extended Universe feeds on. I came hard at that in the ’90s, and then got introduced to [Star Wars:] The Clone Wars. I knew the timeline really well. And I was like, ‘I think if you want to explore Star Wars from the perspective of the bad guys, the best time to do it is when the bad guys are wildly outnumbered. When they actually are essentially the underdogs, for lack of a better term.’ So this would be that era.

Stay tuned for details on Star Wars: The Acolyte.