The Acolyte’s Dafne Keen Thinks Jecki Came Out as a Jedi Knight

Spoilers ahead for episode five of The Acolyte.

The Acolyte accumulates a considerable number of deaths. The last Star Wars The series, created by Leslye Headland, began with the death of Carrie-Anne Moss’ Jedi Master, and in subsequent episodes, the Jedi have fallen to mere stormtroopers. And yet last week’s fifth episode, which saw the deaths of not one but two major characters — including the greatest Padawan of the High Republic era — still came as a surprise.

Dafne Keen, who broke out playing a young Wolverine clone in the 2017 film Logantraded his claws for a lightsaber to play The AcolyteJecki Lon, Padawan of Jedi Master Sol (Squid Game(Lee Jung-jae, Lee). While trying to prevent the murder of another Jedi Master, Jecki and Sol come face to face with a terrifying masked Sith Lord, whose identity Jecki is able to reveal after an intense duel with the much more seasoned warrior. But Qimir (Manny Jacinto) then pulls out a second lightsaber and kills the young Padawan, and shortly after, he kills another young Jedi Knight, Yord, played by Charlie Barnett. It’s a shocking moment that Keen says speaks to the central tension of The Acolyte:Jecki had so much potential, and it all disappeared in the flash of a red lightsaber.

Seeing you play another badass girl with spiky parts felt very natural. Did you see any parallels between X-23 and Jecki?
I always enjoyed playing the role of the little boy and the lonely old man. It’s a fun role to play, especially when you work with such talented actors as Lee Jung-jae and Hugh Jackman. They’re very different characters, but you can find their humanity. They’re both almost orphans.

You talk about their humanity. Did you feel like a stranger in the costume and all that makeup?
It was very strange. I didn’t really feel like an alien; I really felt like myself until I saw the video and I was completely different. It was interesting to discover how to act with a completely new face.

Wookieepedia says Jecki is half-human. What did you know about his history and origins? Was this all written down for you as reference material, or did you make up your own?
Leslye created the story and she gave me a lot of freedom to create more backstory. We talked about it a lot. Jecki was a very talented Jedi who joined the Order at 2 or 3 years old (very young) and who stood out in her classes. Sol, who is very demanding with his Padawans, chose her because she reminded him of Osha, since they were both prodigies. I hope you can see that in the fights in the fifth episode, because it is rare for a Padawan to be this talented in combat and we wanted to show it through this incredible fight scene.

We imagined that she had tried to become a Jedi Knight at the same time as Yord and had been told that it was arrogant to think she could become a knight at such a young age, but that she had the talent to do it. That was kind of the dynamic with Yord: they had done the trials together, and he had been doing them for years, and this 18-year-old girl had done it with him.

This speaks volumes about some of the bad faith criticism of this series. Not that you can refute everything, but I’ve heard people complain about a Padawan going up against a Sith Lord. It didn’t bother me at all: Obi-Wan was a Padawan when he defeated Darth Maul, and Jecki ended up losing and dying. You seem to be offering an even more accurate explanation, in that she wasn’t just any Padawan.
It’s really funny to me to see that because you see Anakin being extremely talented, you see Obi-Wan being extremely talented, you see Ahsoka being extremely talented. Star Wars The story, we’ve seen it so many times. What we were trying to get across in that fight was the potential she had as a Jedi and as a fighter. The reason she wasn’t a knight was because she lacked experience, and a more experienced Jedi would know that a Sith plays dirty and that a Sith would pull out a dagger hidden in his saber. She wouldn’t have expected that because she was very good at fighting in a training circuit, not in a real battle with a real Sith.

Did you play her as a child or as an adult with her own agency? Because the nature of the Jedi, especially the ethics of the Padawan system, is a central part of the series. Sol sends her into battle but is shocked when she is killed because she is “just a child.”
I played her at my age, which is very confusing because legally, Jecki would be an adult. I was 18 when I played her; we all imagined her to be the same age as me. But it’s so arbitrary to say that one day you’re a child and the next day you’re an adult. I think that’s what Sol meant by that. She didn’t have a lot of life experience outside of the Jedi Temple. Especially for someone as adult as Sol, 18 is a child. And for Qimir, she was a child. It’s more of a sentimentality about the brutality of killing an 18-year-old, especially for someone who’s lived a life and had more experiences.

You said in another interview that you played Jecki as if she had a crush on Osha. Can you expand on that? Does part of that come from Jecki meeting a peer outside of the Jedi Order for the first time?
It was really interesting to play that role because that relationship could have been very different. Jecki could have been jealous of Osha and felt threatened by her, but instead she was fascinated by someone who was so much like her. Someone who was Sol’s Padawan, someone who was really talented like her and decided to leave – it was completely new to her. Jecki lived in the Jedi Temple and didn’t have any real-life experiences outside of it. She didn’t have any family because she left at age 3, so she didn’t have the experiences that Osha had with her sister and her mother. She finds Osha so fascinating, and she’s kind of in awe of her. She’s figuring out what she feels for Osha, and I played it as if she had a crush on her. It comes mostly from the fascination and the confusion that comes with loving someone, especially when you’re gay: I don’t know if he is a friend or if I am interested in them. Then add the layer that she was also Sol’s Padawan: Am I jealous of her? Do I want to be like her? Do I want to date her? Jecki had never felt attraction to someone before, so she doesn’t know how it works. It was like an innocent little crush.

Yord’s death was a real surprise because I thought it would just be you, and not two main character deaths in quick succession. How did you and Charlie feel about your character deaths happening one after the other?
We were so excited to die. It’s so rare to find a director and a writer who venture into that. A lot of people these days don’t kill off their characters, or they kill them off and bring them back to life in a very brazen way. It’s so bold of Leslye to create these wonderful, well-rounded characters that she then kills off. It feels so real, so unfair, so sudden. It raises the stakes. And you want stakes. You want danger in something like that. Star Wars. It’s not, “Look how scary this villain is, but he’s not going to kill anyone.” It’s a lot more terrifying and impressive if the villain kills everyone in the first episode you meet him. And also, ego-wise, it was really fun to play a cool character who goes out with style.

Do you think Osha was wrong to stop Sol from killing an unarmed Qimir when he had the chance, even though it was against the Jedi Code?
You shouldn’t get down to his level. It’s better to take the wisest path. Whether that’s good or bad for the story in the long run, I’ll let the viewer decide. But morally, I agree with not killing someone who has killed, because then you’re a killer too.

I couldn’t help but notice that Sol just leaves your body behind. Was that really you on set playing dead for that, and how did it feel to see Jecki and Yord left to rot?
It was Charlie and I who played dead. We spent the whole day lying on the ground, which was really funny. It’s wild that Sol left us, but it’s such an adrenaline rush where he doesn’t think about that kind of thing. He had bigger fish to fry. Besides, to Jedi, people are energy, and he knows that Jecki and Yord are one with the Force now, so their bodies are the least of his worries.

How do you see Jecki’s story? Is it a tragedy, in that her life was cut short so quickly? Was she an ideal Jedi and is that what Jedi are supposed to be?
It’s really a tragedy, especially because of her young age. That exchange between Sol and Qimir, where he says, “She was a child,” and he replies, “You brought her here,” kind of explains everything you need to know. Jecki’s death is completely symbolic and moves the story forward. It gives the characters the motivation to keep fighting, just like Yord’s death.

And in a very beautiful way, Jecki dies a Jedi Knight. She became a knight. She was on a mission, she died fighting a noble cause, fighting a Sith. She was doing very well, he cheated, and she accepted death without anger and with grace. As she says herself, it’s always a beautiful thing to see something or someone become one with the Force. It happened to her.

Did you get to choose the color of his lightsaber? What would you choose?
No, man, we were all given our colors. We all asked for colors, and nobody listened. I think everyone would say they want purple, but I loved the green, like Jecki. It fits my energy and Jecki’s energy. But I would love to have two sabers, for sure.