A resurfaced interview Leslye Headland gave at Star Wars Celebration last year sees the showrunner implying that her series is a lesbian show with a Star Wars veneer.
LONDON, ENGLAND – APRIL 07: attends the studio panel at Star Wars Celebration 2023 attends the studio panel at Star Wars Celebration 2023 in London at ExCel on April 07, 2023 in London, England. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Disney)
X user beerburp23 shared the video in which Headland states, “When I saw Frozen as a grown a** woman, I cried through the entire movie. There was just something about the relationship between the sisters, the like devillainization of the classic kind of fairy tale ‘bad guy,’ you know, the concept of true love being between two sisters and not a heterosexual relationship. It just destroyed me, completely.”
She continued, “And I thought, ‘Gosh, I would love to make something like this, for lack of a better term, Disney.’ Meaning something that like my parents would have allowed me to see when I was younger as a queer person, but I would have been able to understand as a queer person. And I think I would have had a completely different life. And so I really was inspired by it and was like, ‘God, I would love to make a story like this.'”
new lesbian director in the Star Wars franchise
lol when she begrudgingly admits she has to put some star wars into her lesbian romance fantasy
this is why every movie sucks pic.twitter.com/zdiFT2jNs2
— TBJ (@beerburp23) March 20, 2024
Headland then shared she took this idea and pitched it as The Acolyte, “And so when I was developing this original idea to pitch to [Lucasfilm President] Kathleen [Kennedy], I thought well, ‘You know, it can’t just be that.’ When you’re pitching Star Wars you have to pull from what George [Lucas] was also interested in.”
“It can’t just be like well I’m referencing- especially if you’re gonna set something during the High Republic, end of High Republic into prequels. You don’t have the Skywalker Saga. You can’t reference a character that was created by George and/or Filoni. You have to create your own new characters,” she added.
(L-R): Amandla Stenberg, Lee Jung-jae and Director Leslye Headland on the set of Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, exclusively on Disney+. ©2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
This is not unheard of in an interview with Empire that was shared to the StarWarsLeaks subreddit back in May 2023, Headland informed the outlet her pitch to Kennedy was Kill Bill meets Frozen.
She elaborated, “It is sort of a joke. But it was my elevator pitch to Kathy [Kennedy]: ‘I want to take that revisionist version of female villains that you see in a fairy-tale media and tell it through that lens.”
Mae (Amandla Stenberg) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
She also informed the outlet, “When I was a young queer girl, I was just hanging out with Ursula the sea witch [from The Little Mermaid]. As a queer girl growing up, if you don’t identify with the heroes, and the villains show up and they’re all queer-coded, you’re like — yes, that’s me!”
“As a queer filmmaker, you’re gonna see some camp. Inevitably! But I would say that tonally, our references are darker,” she added.
Amandla Stenberg in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
READ: ‘The Acolyte’ Showrunner Reiterates Series Depicts Sith As Underdogs Versus The Jedi Institution
Not only will the show push this queer agenda, but actress Jodie Turner-Smith also shared at Star Wars Celebration how the series will push feminism, “My character, you know, she’s a powerful leader. She’s a powerful leader in a very woman-centered world, which I was very excited to kind of be in that because I feel like Star Wars is very patriarchal.”
“So it was kind of cool to have this sort of woman-centered figure,” she continued. “And you know she’s really sort of going through a struggle because I mean that’s Star Wars, right? She’s really kind of like in this sort of quandary and that’s sort of her journey is to to kind of go through this struggle between two ideas.”
She also told ScreenRant, “We don’t ever really see these more like matriarchal energies.”
She added, “I think we already kind of started to center women in this world with the latest movies, and we’re seeing it as well in a lot of the other TV shows too. But I think it’s often very much about a man’s journey. And this is less about that.”
She informed Entertainment Weekly that the series is “part of a wave of more inclusive and beautifully represented Star Wars shows. So that felt really cool. And I felt the importance of that, especially in some of the stuff that I got to where everyone really was excited about what they were seeing and what that would maybe mean for different fans — fans that don’t necessarily look like what you normally think the traditional Star Wars fan looks like.”
“Because if there’s anything that I learned from this show, it’s that the Star Wars fan is varied,” she said.
(Center): Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) in Lucasfilm’s THE ACOLYTE, exclusively on Disney+. ©2024 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
What do you make of Headland’s comments?
That was pretty blindingly obvious. This is the description of all Disney Star Wars projects.
#RIPStarWars
It’s an old quote but never gets old how she states that the villains are always identifiably q coded. As a good thing. No wonder they’re trying to make them justified
Why even make a Star Wars show? Can’t they just create a new science fantasy show? Ruin Star Wars forever. Force is Frozen Sibling Love. Oddly, the Left often calls Conservatives inbreeding when they are projecting their desires. Disney is NSFW and Not Safe for Kids.