The Acolyte creator had to fight to keep classic Star Wars line in premiere

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

Perhaps more than any other Star Wars series, The Acolyte feels like something of a throwback to the original movies. There is a lot of lightsaber action, there are cute droids and weird creatures all over the place, and even the wipes from scene to scene feel like they’re from a different era. And while there is darkness and death, to be sure, there is also a lighter tone in spots that mirrors some of the first films of the franchise.

Of course, some of the callbacks are even more obvious than that. At one point during the two-episode premiere, Jedi Master Vanestra Rwoh (Rebecca Henderson) says the well-known “May the Force be with you” line to Jedi Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) as he departs for a mission. But another classic, oft-repeated line from throughout the franchise that was uttered almost didn’t make the cut.

While waiting with a trap laid for the assassin Mae (Amandla Stenberg) on the planet Olega, Jedi Knight Yord Fandar (Charlie Barnett) starts to feel uneasy, verbalizing that unease with the famous Luke Skywalker-originated phrase, “I have a bad feeling about this.” According to creator Leslye Headland, it’s a line that she had to fight to keep.

“That was hard to get that in,” Headland tells Entertainment Weekly. “I'm going to be honest. I got a lot of feedback that I shouldn't put that in. But I just feel like when you get the opportunity to do Star Wars, you're just going to shoot your shot. And ‘I have a bad feeling about this’ is incredibly iconic.”

The worry from others seemed to center around the fact that the line might either take viewers out of the moment, or fail to live up to it. “It’s such an iconic line that I think there was some concern of, ‘Well, we don't want to just drop it in there and have everyone go, ‘Oh, I see.’ But I think we found a good way to justify it and make it feel natural and still be an homage.”

That and “May the Force be with you” are not the only pieces of Acolyte dialogue that honor the past. “There are a couple of lines like that that are recurring,” Headland says, “either as callbacks or recurring themes. ‘Close your eyes, you cannot trust them,’ is taken right from A New Hope.’”

As for the person who got to utter the Luke Skywalker classic for The Acolyte, Barnett tells EW that the weight of the moment may have gotten to him a bit: “I had a bad feeling about saying that ‘bad feeling’ line,” he laughs. Although there was another line early in the premiere that gave him even more trouble.

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“There was one day when I'm walking onto the ship to come and talk to Osha,” says Barnett. ”It's one of the first scenes, and I walk in and with my Padawan and use the Force to kind of get them to move on. Leslye kept screaming at me off-screen, ‘Just give me Drag Race! Give me RuPaul fierceness!’ And I was like, ‘What? How is that a note right now? This is Star Wars! What are you freakin’ talking about, Leslye?’ But I also was like, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’”

Clearly something to keep an eye on as we sashay into next week on The Acolyte.

Additional reporting by Devan Coggan.