The Acolyte star Amandla Stenberg reacts to that big twin twist

Warning: This article contains spoilers about Star Wars: The Acolyte episode 5.

As if Amandla Stenberg has not had it hard enough playing twin sisters on The Acolyte, she now is having to embark on an even more difficult mission: playing one twin sister impersonating another.

We caught our first glimpse of this subterfuge at the end of The Acolyte’s fifth episode, which debuted June 25 on Disney+. After Stenberg’s Osha tried to arrest her sister Mae (also played by Stenberg), Mae knocked her twin out and then dramatically cut off her own hair with a lightsaber to impersonate her lookalike and go undercover to either kill Osha’s former master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) or get to the truth of happened on Brendok 16 years ago. Or possibly both.

The twin twist was the last of many shockers in an episode filled with giant moments, all discussed at great length in Entertainment Weekly’s deep dive cover story on the brutally savage installment. Mae’s mysterious master was finally revealed to be Manny Jacinto’s Qimir, who was unmasked right as he killed Jedi Padawn Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen). And he wasn’t done, as the Stranger then proceeded to snap the neck of Jedi Knight Yord Fandar (Charlie Barnett).

We got some additional intel from Stenberg about how she approached the episode, what happens next, and why Mae’s fight with Jecki was her favorite of the entire series.

ENTERTAINMENT WEKELY: What was it like shooting episode 5? It’s essentially one big action scene?

AMANDLA STENBERG: Yeah, it's brutal, isn't it? It was one big action sequence, but this is also when I really started having scenes against myself. Of course, I was thinking about the action sequences, but by the time we reached this episode, I had spent months training already. So thankfully, when we started filming this one, I had a much better intuition and could learn things really quickly. And I think I was more focused on the task of playing opposite myself than I was at the action elements, miraculously.

What was it like playing opposite yourself and maintaining the right head space for each character in that big scene.

The ideological hatred is such a complex thing, because it's really passion that's just steeped in belief systems. And so it was really important for me that I truly believe the perspective of each sister, which [creator Leslye Headland] crafted in a way that has a lot of nuance and depth. So I just had to believe the circumstances for each one and physically at that point, I'd spent a lot of time with both of them, so I understood who they were.

I was really struck by the moment when Mae has Osha in that hug and says, “Choose me. Choose us. We both survived. All we have is each other now.” What is the future she sees for them at that point?

I think most of Mae's life has been driven from a place of emotionality and love, and I thought about them as maintaining balance when it comes to expression and the ability to express love and affection versus compartmentalize it. I wanted them to feel like together they represented all of the qualities of a person, but that when segregated into two, their qualities were both their superpowers and their downfalls. And so Mae really only cares about heritage and her family and love and intimacy. And I think her entire belief system is also rocked when she learns that her sister is still alive, because ultimately her path of vengeance is not driven just by hatred, it's driven by a sense of loyalty that she has to her family.

Where is Mae’s head at in terms of the Jedi when she decides to impersonate Osha? On one hand, she left her master and was going to turn herself into Kelnacca, but she also obviously still harbors resentment towards Sol for taking Osha away from her. So what’s her game plan here?

She is moving from an incredibly protective place at this point, even though it might look complicated. I think her feeling is Osha is lost. She has no ability to find her way. “I can't trust her logic, I can't trust her belief system, and so I have to take matters into my own hands.”

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It's hard enough playing different characters, but now you have to play one character posing as another character, and I'm just curious what that experience was like.

I got tripped up sometimes in my head because we had a conversation of: How good of an actress is Mae? I really made decisions from the place of what I just thought would be interesting for people to watch. And what I thought would be the most interesting is if it felt like they were two very distinct people. I thought narratively it would be more engaging and more fun to follow that way. So with Mae pretending to be Osha, I actually started by thinking, “Well, how would Mae wear Osha’s clothes? She wouldn't wear them the way Osha does.” And so we made slight tweaks here and there — less so that the clothes would look different than they do on Osha, but more so I could feel as I was wearing them that I was Mae.

How much fun was that fight scene you and Dafne got to do?

Oh, that's my favorite flight sequence that I do in the whole series.

Why?

Because it's dirty, and because I think it's so cool to see a fight sequence between two very distinct young women. And I feel like it was the fight sequence for both of us that we got to imbue the most emotion into. And it also just was choreographed in such a way where it moves around the set a lot and it engages with different parts of it in a way that just feels like such a classic kind of assassin martial arts sequence.

And what was it like working with Manny, especially with his big reveal here as the Sith villain?

I had been waiting for that moment the whole shoot, and he had been, too. We were kind of the first to arrive to set, and so we glommed onto each other as soon as we got into pre-production and held onto each other for dear life. We would hang out a lot just to freak out about the fact that we were making Star Wars. We really became support systems for each other. And it was really cool in those early days to talk about the multiplicity. We would both be entering with these two different portrayals and bounce ideas off of each other and be like, “I think I'm going to make this character this way and this other character this way. What do you think of that?” We really helped each other brainstorm that process.

That moment where he breaks character as the Stranger to go “Hello!” in his old Qimir voice to Mae is so good.

Manny's incredibly clever. There are lots of ideas sprinkled throughout the show that were Manny's entirely — that were improvised last minute or that he pitched while we were in the middle of story points. He's a great writer as well as an actor.

How does what happened here in episode 5 set up the last few episodes?

The power dynamics and structures that we've seen so far have now kind of been inversed, which sets up both of the characters to go on a completely different journey. Everything that they both have believed to be true has been challenged in some way. And so now the question is: What do they do with that information?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.