‘The Acolyte’ creator explains that shocking premiere opening scene

Warning: This article contains spoilers about the two-episode premiere of Star Wars: The Acolyte.

Well, that certainly didn’t last long. Fans were giddy with anticipation to see Carrie-Anne Moss wield a lightsaber as Jedi Master Indara on Star Wars: The Acolyte, and they did not have to wait long to get it as she powered up the green blade before the opening credits even appeared. Little did they know when said fight scene began that (absent any flashbacks to come) it would be her last.

Moss’ Indara was struck down in the series’ very first scene by a mysterious assassin played by Amandla Stenberg — an assassin later revealed to be a revenge-seeking twin named Mae who was separated from her sister Osha (also played by Stenberg) by the Jedi when they were young.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly’s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

The death serves as the inflection point for the entire story, leading Osha and her former Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) to search for the rogue Force-user. But show creator Leslye Headland says there was also another reason to kill off Moss’ character so soon. “The truth is that I just wanted to create a cold open,” Headland tells Entertainment Weekly. “I think it’s the TV writer in me, to create a cold open that you were just shocked by.”

In fact, there was a specific opening scene that inspired the showrunner to come out of the gate so strong. “Not to compare myself at all to Vince Gilligan, but the cold open to Breaking Bad is one of the best cold opens ever. So whenever I sit down to write anything, I’m like, ‘Well, I won’t be able to top that, but in my show, what’s the version of that?’ And it felt like the best I could come up with was killing Carrie-Anne Moss. It was icing Trinity and just having everyone go, ‘I’m sorry. What’s happening in this?’”

As for the person that does the on-screen icing, Stenberg says a lot of work went into pulling off that jaw-dropping “Force-fu” battle. “I think about the training process, and slowly I was introduced to each element that would then lead to me knowing all the stunt choreography,” says Stenberg. “So it started with just practicing slicing the air at varying degrees until I could do it without guidance, and working on the positioning of my hips and where my power would come from. All of that contributed to me understanding what I wanted the physicality of the character to be.”

While Mae is obviously a super powerful warrior, Stenberg did not want to simply show power. “What I really like about this character is that I didn’t want her to feel like she was just a brute force,” Stenberg says. “I just felt like she wasn’t written that way when I picked apart all the subtext of what Leslye had written. And when I thought about what these characters represent, which is kind of the light and dark sides of the Force, the dark side of the Force is seductive and it plays tricks on you. And that’s what I really love about Mae and all of her choreography.”

Of course, Stenberg is not just playing one character, but two. So how does her approach to playing the pair take into consideration their similarities and differences? “I think of them as always in flux with each other. So a quality that one of them might really be exhibiting, the other one is lacking. And then when that one starts to take on more of that quality, it weans in the other one. I think of them as always kind of an interplay with each other.”

For Stenberg, the interplay between Mae and Osha leans into a long Star Wars tradition. “I think of them as yin and yang,” she says of the pair. “That was really important to me. And we have some of that imagery in the show. Yin and yang has also been important imagery in the Star Wars universe through The Last Jedi and The Clone Wars. And I love that kind of part of the allure of Star Wars.”

She even references a famous Clone Wars installment that was revisited at the end of the Ahsoka season finale. “One of my favorite episodes of Clone Wars is about the father and the daughter and the son. They’re kind of like the Greek gods of the Star Wars universe, and they very much embody that concept of yin and yang. And these are the main forces that govern the universe. So because our twins are kind of magical and come from a magical community, I thought of them as embodying these concepts.”

Even if that means slaying a Jedi Master in the process.