Star Wars: The Acolyte star’s heartbreaking reaction to cancellation

The sad news broke earlier this week: Disney+ had chosen not to renew Star Wars: The Acolyte for a second season. The series had outspoken detractors who were so determined to help it fail that they began criticizing the wrong Acolyte on Rotten Tomatoes. While the show also had a strong following, the outpouring of positivity clearly wasn’t enough to keep the show alive. Many people took to social media to express their displeasure with the decision, but most people from the show haven’t publicly addressed the cancellation. However, that changed today when Manny Jacinto (Qimir/The Stranger) shared a simple but heartbreaking message on Instagram.

Jacinto shared a photo of himself and Amandla Stenberg (Osha) from the finale of The Acolyte and captioned it with a heart emoji. You can check out the post below:

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A post shared by Manny Jacinto (@mannyjacinto)

Manny Jacinto wanted a romance with Oshamir in season 2:

(Photo:

Amandla Stenberg and Manny Jacinto in The Acolyte finale.

– Lucasfilm)

There are many reasons to be disappointed The AcolyteThe show’s cancellation is a big deal, and one of the biggest is not knowing where Qimir and Osha’s story could go next. At the end of the season finale, “The Acolyte,” Osha goes to train with Qimir, and in their final moment of the episode, he takes her hand as they stare out into the ocean of the unnamed planet. “Oshamir” shippers felt pretty validated by the episode, and Jacinto was ready to explore this relationship further.

“In the fan art I’ve seen, there’s a lot of stuff that implies… something between Osha and the Stranger,” Jacinto said. GQ“It’s something that people have been looking forward to in this genre, or at least in this IP, and I like that people are interested in it and rooting for it. So I think people can expect more of that, maybe. If people want, we can explore that in a later season.”

In a recent interview with Weekly Entertainment, Stenberg teased the potential romance between Osha and Qimir.

“It was Manny’s idea,” Stenberg said of that initial contact moment. “We pitched a lot of different things, and now we have tons of sellers, of course, on Twitter and Tumblr and people who now call him Oshamir. And they really wanted to see a romantic arc play out with Qimir and Osha, which is totally understandable. And that was the original vision.”

“But when we got to that point in the shoot, we went back to Osha’s choices and that sense of autonomy, and we just decided that we didn’t feel like a romantic resolution was quite earned yet. And we also wanted Osha’s journey to be independent of that arc. So we decided, ‘Okay, you know what? Let’s just put that aside for now,’” she added.

“We also felt like there was a lot of weight and importance in the political alignment that’s happening between these two characters, and Osha has reached this place inside that Qimir is pushing her to. We wanted to keep that in focus, and we were like, ‘What kind of symbol can we use to evoke a political alignment between them and this union?’ But there’s also a lot of intimacy in that kind of shared vision and power, and Manny had the idea that instead of holding hands, they were going to hold the lightsaber together, which we thought was great.”

“He was suggesting things like that all the time. Anytime there was intimacy or physical representations of their intimacy, it was largely Manny’s idea, and we just leaned into it,” she explained.

“Yeah, totally,” Stenberg added when Well He touched on the fact that there’s never been a full-on dark side romance in live-action before. “And I think that’s also Leslye’s (Headland) sensibility. (Laughs) Leslye’s a Sith and I’m a Scorpio, so I think that appeals to both of us. Also, because of where we exist in the timeline, it’s more interesting to explore that kind of intimate connection because the Sith exist in the underbelly of the universe, and so they’re not the dominant force in the universe at that point, which I think is a little bit more conducive to what’s an underdog relationship like at this point in the timeline.”

The Acolyte is now available to stream on Disney+.