Star Wars: The Acolyte Star Has Heartbreaking Reaction to Cancellation

The sad news broke earlier this week that Disney+ had opted not to renew Star Wars: The Acolyte for a second season. The show had outspoken haters who were so hellbent on helping it fail that they started review-bombing the wrong Acolyte on Rotten Tomatoes. While the show also had many vocal fans, the outpour of positivity clearly wasn’t enough to keep the show going. Many people have taken to social media to express their unhappiness with the decision, but most folks from the series have not addressed the cancellation publically. However, that changed today when Manny Jacinto (Qimir/The Stranger) shared a simple yet heartbreaking post on Instagram. 

Jacinto shared a shot of him and Amandla Stenberg (Osha) from the finale of The Acolyte and captioned it with a heart emoji. You can check out the post below:

Manny Jacinto Wanted an Oshamir Romance in Season 2:

There are many reasons to be bummed about The Acolyte‘s cancellation, and a big one is not knowing where Qimir and Osha’s story could go next. At the end of the season finale, “The Acolyte,” Osha goes off to train with Qimir, and in their final moment of the episode, he takes her hand as they stare out into the ocean of the unnamed planet. The “Oshamir” shippers felt pretty validated by the episode, and Jacinto was down to explore that relationship further. 

“In the fan art I’ve seen, there’s a good amount that implies… something between Osha and the Stranger,” Jacinto told GQ. “That’s something that people, I think, have been yearning for in this genre, or at least in this IP, and I love that people are honing in on it and encouraging it. So I think people can look forward to more of that, possibly. If people want it, we can explore that in a subsequent season.”

During a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Stenberg addressed the potential romance between Osha and Qimir.

“That was Manny’s idea,” Stenberg said of the hand-hold moment. “We pitched a lot of different things, and now we’re getting tons of shippers, of course, on Twitter and Tumblr and people who are now calling it Oshamir. And they really wanted to see some romantic arc take place with Qimir and Osha, which totally get it. And that was the original vision.”

“But as we arrived to that point in filming, again, we returned to Osha’s choices and this sense of it feeling autonomous, and we just came to the decision that we didn’t feel like a romantic resolution was quite earned yet. And we also wanted Osha’s journey to be autonomous from that arc. And so we decided, ‘Okay, you know what? Let’s table it for now,’” she added. 

“We also just felt like there was a lot of weight and significance in the political alignment that’s happening between those two characters, and Osha internally reaching this place that Qimir has been pushing her towards. We wanted to keep the focus on that, and we were like, ‘What’s some sort of symbol that we can utilize that connotes a political alignment between them and this union?’ But also there’s a lot of intimacy in that sort of shared vision and power, and Manny came up with instead of holding hands, they’re going to hold the lightsaber together, which we just thought was awesome.”

“He would pitch things like that all the time. Whenever there is intimacy or physical representations of their intimacy, a lot of it was Manny’s idea, and we just leaned in,” she explained. 

“Yeah, totally,” Stenberg added when EW brought up the fact that there’s never been a full Dark Side romance in live-action before. “And I think that’s just also Leslye’s [Headland] sensibilities. [Laughs] Leslye is a Sith and I’m a Scorpio, and so I think that appeals to both of us. Also, because of where we exist in the timeline, it makes it more interesting to explore that kind of intimate connection because the Sith exists in the underbelly of the universe, and so they are not the dominating forces of the universe at that point, which I think is kind of more fodder for what is an underdog relationship like at this point in the timeline.” 

The Acolyte is now streaming on Disney+.