The actor unpacks The Acolyte ’s emotional season finale and speculates on where Osha and Mae could go in Season 2. For an actor, there are few things more challenging than playing identical twins. Nicolas Cage once said that while portraying both Charlie and Donald Kaufman in Adaptation , “I literally wanted to scream.
And then, in fact, did scream.” A young Lindsay Lohan joked that the hardest part of filming The Parent Trap was “remembering both lines.” Now, Star Wars has its first identical twins.
Sort of. In the latest Star Wars show, The Acolyte , Amandla Stenberg portrays one Force-sensitive person literally split in two thanks to a powerful “vergence” in the Force. This gave the actor the opportunity to play their characters (Mae and Osha) as two halves of a whole, culminating in a stunning mirror-image fight scene and a whole lot of soul searching.
“There was always kind of a confrontation of self,” Stenberg tells Inverse of the show’s emotionally fraught Season 1 finale. To prepare for The Acolyte , the actor went all-in on building a backstory for each character, tracing their respective journeys from childhood into adulthood in a process that showrunner Leslye Headland actively encouraged. “Leslye gave me so much creative freedom to imagine what their lives had been like up until the point that we meet them,” Stenberg says.
“So it did become like a 50-page extravaganza.” They even crafted unique playlists to get into the right mindsets .