Over a year after The Acolyte was axed on Disney Plus after only one season, the show's creator Leslye Headland has admitted she wasn't surprised by the decision, but she didn't expect how the news was delivered to the fans, and to her.
"I was not surprised by it. I think I was surprised at the swiftness of it and the publicness of it. I was surprised by how it was handled," she told The Wrap. "But once I was getting particular phone calls about the reaction and the criticism and the viewership, I felt like 'OK, the writing's on the wall for sure.'"
Despite getting a good reception among critics (it stands at 79% on Rotten Tomatoes), the show became a target of racist online attacks. Lead actor Amandla Stenberg called out "a rampage of… hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudiced hatred and hateful language" towards the cast, and admitted the cancellation was "not a huge shock."
Headland thinks "the whole thing with The Acolyte was always a major risk," as it was a very different story for the beloved sci-fi franchise. "It was a new part of the timeline. It was all new characters. It was a part of the lore where you couldn’t use a Storm Trooper, you didn't have the reference of the politics and war that Tony Gilroy has brilliantly exploited in such a genius way in Andor. But all that iconography and all those visual references are original trilogy references, and our references were the High Republic novels and the publishing initiative and then the prequels, specifically with the lightsabers," she explained.
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