This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter in which our editors recommend one can’t-miss story every weekday. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
At 25, Amandla Stenberg has been acting professionally for over half her life. But the glitzy promotional obligations that come with a starring role in a massive Disney+/Lucasfilm venture like Star Wars: The Acolyte—the newest streaming series to emerge from that galaxy far, far away—still take some getting used to.
When we meet—on a Wednesday, for midday breakfast at a diner in Brooklyn’s leafy Cobble Hill neighborhood—Stenberg arrives with her hair still impeccably braided from last night, when she and her Acolyte castmates were at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan for an upfront presentation, a lavish TV-industry soiree designed to stoke advertisers’ excitement about the upcoming season’s slate.
“Imagine you’re in a giant room,” she says, producing her phone to show me a video of the decked-out banquet hall, “and they’re blasting Disney scores, but with trap beats underneath.”
Stenberg hadn’t done much television before taking the lead role in the new series, which debuts June 4, so this all feels relatively novel. “I’m used to doing panels and stuff,” she says, “but I’m not used to going to a panel and there’s also, like, R2-D2 on the stage, and flames and fog.” (And along with the droids and Wookiees, there were many other celestial beings in orbit: “I saw Danny DeVito and Kim K.," Stenberg reports, "in very close proximity to each other.”)
At the diner, Stenberg sheds her jacket to reveal a pair of flared hip-huggers and a white T-shirt with black block type that reads: “I ♥ Being Surveilled.” Suddenly, we are having a metatextual experience.
As she’ll explain later, she made the T-shirt on one of those lawless websites where you can design and order custom merchandise, and it’s one of her favorites; a magazine interview seems like as good a time as any to wear it. (“Honestly, I researched you, and I thought you would think it was funny,” Stenberg tells me. Got me there.)
But the shirt is also an acknowledgment of another reality: Thanks to her new project, the eyes of the galaxy are on her.
The Acolyte, show-run by Russian Doll cocreator Leslye Headland, takes place at the end of the High Republic era, about a century before the Imperial turbulence of George Lucas’s late-1990s Phantom Menace prequel trilogy. It’s a period that’s gone unexplored in Star Wars and its various spinoffs until very recently. It’s also a very interesting time in the lore. The Jedi Order is at the height of its power; a sense of apparent peace belies the unrest that’s mounting elsewhere. (After all, the fans know which way the Jedi and the High Republic are headed.)
Stenberg plays twin warriors, Mae and Osha, whose dual relationship with the Force puts them at the center of this cosmic political tension; Headland has said she wants the show to explore and question the Jedi’s use of power, and how their reign could yield to space fascism in just a hundred years.
After she was cast, Stenberg spent more than a year delving into the Star Wars mythos. Despite self-identifying as a “huge nerd” with a longstanding admiration for speculative fiction, the franchise always presented a bit of a block for the actress. From an early age, she’d understood the allure of Natalie Portman’s Padmé Amidala, but the fandom as a whole never felt quite accessible.
“I had a childhood experience of the series, but not really an adult one,” Stenberg says. She’d assumed things about the (generally underdeveloped) role of women in the Star Wars universe that turned out not to be true. Getting the role presented the perfect opportunity for her to become “the superfan that I knew I could be,” and she soon found herself “obsessed with the female characters.”
For the show’s first major press event, at the big annual convention Star Wars Celebration in London last spring, Stenberg did a bit of Padmé cosplay—specifically, donning the pop-star-caliber action attire Portman’s character wears on a visit to the desert planet of Geonosis in 2002’s Attack of the Clones: a chalk-white catsuit with a gunmetal-gray holster belt; matching lug-soled boots; and a soft, wheat-toned shawl. A true pinnacle of spec-fic sex appeal. (Its closest rival may well be Trinity’s molten PVC trench in The Matrix, as worn by Carrie-Anne Moss, whom Stenberg coincidentally battles in The Acolyte’s early scenes.)
“I think as a queer person, kind of everything I do in the public sphere is drag in some capacity,” she says. “I was just like, ‘I'll have so much more fun at a con if I cosplay.’” (Stenberg uses she/they pronouns but says she’s been leaning toward the former lately.) She’d mentioned the idea to the film’s costume designers, Jennifer Bryan and Amanda Cox, laying out her plan to source and craft the components. But when she got to work the following Monday, the outfit was there waiting for her.
“It was one of the most special gifts I've ever received,” she says, “besides a sculpture that I have of Darth Vader's head covered in ornate Mexican beading that was given to me by pgLang.” As in…Kendrick Lamar’s mysterious multimedia company.
Ah, yes—Kendrick. When Stenberg and I meet, The Beef has just reached medium well. “Not Like Us” can be heard blasting from car windows every hour, on the hour. As a Los Angeles native, her allegiances are staunch (“pgLang for life”), and she believes KDot’s brooding volley “Meet the Grahams” is “an absolute masterpiece. It's like a three-act play.” It’s also worth noting that she starred in a short film for Baby Keem, Kendrick’s cousin, last fall.
For Stenberg, who frequently plays the role of “the Morgan Freeman narrator” (her phrase) to explain pop-culture happenings to her friends, the Kendrick/Drake schism is the dissertation topic of a lifetime. “I've never spent so much concentrated time online in recent memory until that beef went out,” she says. Knowing that she’s plugged in enough to maintain at least a few (mostly sapphic-themed) Instagram meme accounts she prefers to keep anonymous, I take this with a grain of salt.
Even on a rainy weekday afternoon, the diner hums with a steady stream of patrons: solo diners reading at the counter, families with babbling infants nestled into booths, sundry Brooklynites convened over platters of griddled eggs and toast. Beneath a glowing neon sign and a sill full of greenery, our window table overlooks the drizzly sidewalk. Stenberg orders coffee and a bowl of plain hot oats.
She’s lived here in the city for the past four years; despite growing up in LA, she mostly associates her hometown with work now. She visited New York often as a kid—her mom, Karen, grew up in the South Bronx—and she always envisioned that it was where she’d end up. When she was younger, she read tons of science fiction and fantasy books. She cites The Lord of the Rings and The Dark Tower as her favorites; she still watches The Twilight Zone regularly. Her interests steered her right into the biggest sci-fi franchise of the aughts, 2012’s The Hunger Games, in her breakout role as 12-year-old District 11 tribute Rue, whose pathos kicked Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen and her rebel alliance into overdrive. By then, Stenberg’s idle time had led her into the cyberspace trenches of Tumblr, Reddit, and Stardoll; later on, her real-life activism underscored her NAACP Image Award–winning performance as Starr Carter, a Black teenager who witnesses a police officer kill her childhood friend at a traffic stop, in 2017’s The Hate U Give, and her wily online humor supercharged the 2022 ensemble horror-romp Bodies Bodies Bodies.
But indeed, Headland thought of Rue when she approached Stenberg for her role in The Acolyte, a meeting for which the showrunner came equipped with concept art that already featured the actress’s face. “She’s been through this with The Hunger Games—she’s worked on something that’s extremely high-profile that deals with complex sociological issues as well as being emotionally touching,” Headland tells me. “It felt inevitable that she would come into her own to lead a franchise like this.” She told Stenberg early on that she didn’t just need a series lead; she was looking for a partner-in-crime.
Since Headland was a lifelong superfan of the source material, Stenberg had a lot of catching up to do. “I spent a lot of time on Wookieepedia,” the actress says, coating the surface of her oatmeal with granulated sugar, “and I really love Star Wars conspiracy theories.” Thankfully, deep dives are one of her favorite pastimes, and she was delighted “to exist in fantasyland [and] do methodical research on mythical beings and worlds as my job.”
When I ask Headland if she knew of Stenberg’s nerdiness when she cast her, she laughs. The short answer is no. “My wife and I always joke about how intimidating it is to talk to Amandla because you just feel like she’s really looking at you. She’s not just thinking about the next thing she’s going to say…. She is looking straight into your eyes,” the showrunner explains. “[For] someone that’s so composed and poised and beautiful to say, ‘Oh, I know all about this stuff.’ It’s like, ‘Oh, okay, great. We’re on the same page then.’”
In 2022, Stenberg spent part of her Acolyte preparation alongside her Bodies Bodies Bodies costar Myha’la. The two had reunited to play sisters in Asset 15, an immersive augmented-reality sci-fi mobile game co-created by The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman, and Myha’la remembers Stenberg studying Star Wars movies in between takes on set.
Myha’la says she’d been keeping an eye out for Stenberg when she was still trying to break into the biz. “I was like, ‘She's the one whose heels I'm chasing, the one I'm going to be fighting for these roles,’” the star of HBO’s Industry tells me. But once the two connected, “we got on like a house on fire immediately.”
“I was equal parts intimidated and enamored by her because she's one of the most beautiful living creatures on the planet,” Myha’la says. “Super down to earth, incredibly approachable, a little bit nerdy, which makes her quite charming.” Echoing Headland, she adds, “She's got a lot of time for people. Amandla's patient and really looks people in the eye and really listens to them. And I love that about her. She just has a very otherworldly quality that draws you in.”
Stenberg’s experience making The Acolyte has felt spiritual, even philosophical. Early on during production she wrote out a timeline of “everything that has ever happened in Star Wars,” tracking whenever the Force leaned toward dark or light. “Sci-fi is so incredible because it allows us to look at our world with less fear,” she says, spoon-folding the sugar into her oats. “We are able to think about war, power, violence, prejudice, conflict…. It feels like something we can digest.”
The same digestible quality that makes allegorical fantasy universes so popular also makes them ideal sites for proxy battles over thorny real-world culture-war issues. Nowadays, every new iteration of a beloved cultural myth—whether it’s Star Wars, Ghostbusters, or even The Little Mermaid—becomes a space where representational identity politics collide with fan protectiveness and curdled nostalgia, not to mention plain old racism and trollish bad faith.
In the original Star Wars trilogy, a scrappy, yearning, tawny-haired farm boy goes on a series of adventures and finds within himself the power to save the universe from evil. Over the years—but particularly over the past decade—a small but noisy fraction of fans has jeered every Star Wars story that deviates in any way from that narrative, accusing the saga’s various creative stewards of selling out core Star Wars values in favor of an ostensibly left-of-center aesthetic.
In this version of recent history, the decision to center the Disney sequel-trilogy around a female protagonist (Daisy Ridley’s Rey) was a cynical play for girl-power points, and the mild subversions of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi were an act of unconscionable betrayal.
But if there’s been a unifying theme to the loyal opposition’s gripes, it has to do with casting, and specifically with the increased presence of nonwhite actors in Star Wars films and TV shows. Getting involved with modern-day Star Wars in any capacity means taking heat online, but actors like John Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran, and Moses Ingram have dealt with reactionary fandom at its ugliest.
The internet is always listening; there are things Stenberg is willing to say about Star Wars fandom on the record, and there are things she’s wary to discuss. “There’s a really vast array of Star Wars fans. There is a specific kind of Star Wars fan that’s very vocal on the internet,” she offers, diplomatically. But then again, as she concedes later, “they’ve called our show The Woke-alyte a fair amount—which I’m like, ‘Okay, what about it?’”
If Stenberg’s able to tune out the noise, it’s partly because she’s been here before. In Suzanne Collins’s original novel, Stenberg’s Hunger Games character Rue is described as having “dark brown skin and eyes.” But when Stenberg got the part, the news still triggered a racist online backlash from fans who’d evidently imagined an all-white cast while enjoying this novel about [checks notes] the grotesque extremes of social inequality. Back then, she mostly remembers “people around me feeling very disturbed by it, and that making me sad, that people around me were sad.”
The way she experiences it now isn’t so different from when she was 14. “Prejudice, on some level, of course, it affects me,” she says. “Even if it’s subconsciously or in the body, and there’s work that I need to do around that in order to protect myself. But in my conscious mind, it doesn’t bother me, because I think it’s stupid and kind of funny.”
She laughs, and then offers another thought. “I’ll expound on it: The reason why I think it's funny is because I think a lot of it that we see these days comes from a place of fear and desperation, of there being these massive cultural shifts due to the Information Age, and a lot of truth is coming to the surface…. The needle is shifting very rapidly, and it makes those who have been in traditional positions of comfort and power very uncomfortable, and they’re vocal about it.”
She shrugs. This sort of societal analysis comes easily to Stenberg; she’s been doing it publicly for years, since she was a teenager. Her perspective makes her uniquely qualified to navigate this role—to helm a show that’s in part about cultural needle-shifts in a far-off galaxy. But she’s also been famous long enough that she’s had to make peace with her ideas being public, her thoughts and choices wedged forever in the metadata. (Even past outfits make her wince: “There’s just random moments where I’m like, ‘Oh my God. That was the morning that I had that mental breakdown and then I chose to wear that blue lipstick.’”)
In this and other contexts, she maintains, “I have fun being cynical and dissecting this stuff.” But any time this conversation skirts the complications of this particular project, I can see her choosing her words carefully. (We ♥ being surveilled.)
“If I censor myself, it’s not because the studio is censoring me; it’s because there is a larger goal with this show,” she explains. “If I alienate certain folks or if I make it feel like this is a polarized conversation, I think it will actually hinder the show from reaching people it needs to. So, when I’m uncertain of exactly how to phrase something, it’s because I want to service those folks and I want to service the show as best as possible. At this point in my life, I am decent at predicting what will turn into a headline.”
Then again, as her friend Myha’la says, “one of the biggest takeaways from Amandla as a human being, professional and otherwise, is just that the level of vulnerability and truth is always there. She can't tell a lie.”
Meanwhile, in the dozen years since Stenberg played Rue, more and more people have found the impulse and platform to speak out.
“There are so many different other kinds of Star Wars fans who are loving and supportive and probably less vocal on the internet in that way. But there’s also a significant sect of Black creators and Black Star Wars fans on TikTok who are being vocal about…the pushback that we’ve received and where it comes from,” she says. “And those folks make me so deeply happy, and those are the folks that I’m so grateful to, and I want to send as much recognition and love and gratitude towards them because they keep us grounded.” After all, if you proclaim to love a universe, wouldn’t you want to see how far it goes?
While many Disney+ Star Wars shows, including The Mandalorian and Ashoka, rely heavily on a huge LED stage colloquially known as the Volume, The Acolyte was filmed over nine months at Shinfield Studios in southern England, on physical sets that gave the intergalactic circumstances a reassuringly tactile feel.
One day during filming, Stenberg—whose nonacting hobbies include building unusual environments in virtual reality—walked into a production office and noticed a forest map on the wall, complete with swatches of varying ecological textures. “I saw a map and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a theoretical world building map for the forest.’ And they were like, ‘No—that’s a real map for the forest,’” she recalls. “That’s how large the set was that was being built. It required a map to navigate it.” They’d built a teeming ecosystem on a soundstage inside a colossal concrete warehouse, whose real-life trees and fresh ferns were tended to by a league of gardeners.
When she tells me this, I’m reminded of a point she made earlier about the life Star Wars has taken on in its near-half-century of existence, how its stories are being told by those who envision a spatial arrangement of the galaxy that extends far beyond the initial map they were given: “Star Wars is kind of like a living organism,” she said. “It’s contributed to by so many different creators.” Everyone is creating the world together. You know, build it and they will come.
The Acolyte’s on-set forest even smelled like the woods—but by nature of putting actual plants inside a metal-cement enclosure for nine months, the biochemistry shifted over time. In other words, things got rank.
“If you're pouring a bunch of water into soil on top of a concrete floor, it starts to get funky after a while,” she laughs. “So we saw it sort of decaying, even though there was so much work being put into maintaining it.” (There’s a metaphor here, too, for Star Wars and its evolution: Anything that isn’t periodically refreshed eventually starts to rot.)
Lately, Stenberg has been spending a lot of time in the actual forests of upstate New York. She has a house there, a literal cabin in the woods, which she visits as often as she can. On an ideal day there, she’ll wake up, make coffee. (Good first steps.) The rest is when the world is really her oyster. She might read, knit, do origami, or paint. She might wander around the local Walmart, which she finds calming. “I could spend forever in there,” she muses. If you've spent any time in a small-town Walmart, you know that it can be a palace of dazed possibility.
On one of those Walmart runs last summer, she bought a poker set and a fishing rod. She grew up fishing with her Danish-born dad, Tom, who lives in Copenhagen. (“I like a lot of old-man activities [because] of my dad,” she adds.) These days, it’s about catch and release only. Just for the love of the game.
Up north, she’s got a chainsaw, a weed whacker, and a leaf blower. She hauls her trash to the dump in a crew-cab pickup truck. The truck is 20 years old; the steering-wheel cover is new. “It's bright pink and bedazzled,” Stenberg says. “It's all about balance.”
When she signed on for The Acolyte, she admits, “I knew it would shape my life for a long time, so is this how I want to spend my life? And then, in a strange way, I kind of felt like [this is] oddly, maybe, exactly how I want to spend my life.”
As Myha’la puts it, Stenberg has “already done the whole thing that so many of us are just catching up to. When you've done so much and had so much success so young, you get to the age where you're fully self-sufficient and all you want to do is do some normal shit. You want to drive a truck to Walmart.”
There are other things Stenberg wants to do with her life too, of course: directing; making and sharing more music. Balance is complicated. Stenberg sometimes considers moving upstate full time; she’s sober, and being in the city can be hell on the nervous system. Far from any forests to speak of (real, constructed, or otherwise), she’s gearing up to spend some time ping-ponging around junkets and red carpets, introducing this new corner of the galaxy to our world. The Force, as she points out, “will never lean just towards one side, that it will always maintain this place in the middle. It's actually how this is supposed to be.”
“I feel overwhelmed by the amount of stimulation here sometimes,” Stenberg says. “I might get the heck out of Dodge. I might have to.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ashley Peña at Family Artist Management
Styled by Brandon Tan
Hair by Dre Demry Sanders using Dyson
Skin by Rose Grace using Victoria Beckham Beauty
Manicure by Nori using Chanel Le Vernis
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub
Set design by Jenny Correa at Walter Schupfer Management
