Star Wars: The Acolyte's Dafne Keen Calls Her Character "Jedi David Bowie"

Dafne Keen breaks down her Star Wars character, Jecki Lon.

By Jamie Jirak

The highly-anticipated new Disney+ series, Star Wars: The Acolyte, is debuting on the streaming site next month, and the first reactions to the series have been very positive. The show features many exciting stars, including Dafne Keen, who is best known for playing Laura/X-23 in Logan. In The Acolyte, Keen is playing a Jedi padawan named Jecki Lon. During a recent chat with Empire, Keen compared the Jedi to an unlikely legend: David Bowie.

"As soon as we put that makeup on, I went to [showrunner Leslye Headland] and I was like, 'This is David Bowie.' And she was like, 'You're absolutely right.' We had the running joke that it was like Jedi David Bowie. Jedi Bowie, like, duh! It's almost funky '70s, '80s-looking, which is really cool. I was so excited by the braid – as a Star Wars fan, to get a Padawan braid is, like, the sickest thing ever. I was so excited when they put it in. 'Oh my god, I have my own Padawan braid!' It was really cool."

During the chat, Keen also teased her character's dynamic with the other Jedi, and called Jecki Lon "mature beyond her years."

Keen teases a "really fun dynamic between Jecki and Charlie Barnett's character Yord [Fandar] – he's a great friend of mine, I adore him. Jecki's much more competent than he is, the entire time. But he's a Knight, because he's older. So there's this really interesting dynamic of him being a little bit useless, and her being like, 'You need to step your game up.' Which was really fun to play." 

"We already knew he was talented because we've all seen him," she added of Lee Jung-jae, who is playing Jecki's Master, Sol. "But he was doing scenes in a language that's not his own. He didn't know English! He was learning the lines, and he was killing it. He was doing a better job than 90% of us on set, it was insane."

Related:

What Is The Acolyte About?

Set during The High Republic, Star Wars: The Acolyte delivers an investigation into a mysterious string of crimes, which pits a Jedi master against his former apprentice in a race to uncover the truth. The more that the pair learn about the situation, the darker their journey becomes, as they confront things that darker than either of them could have imagined.

The series stars Amandla Stenberg, Lee Jung-jae, Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Charlie Barnett, Jodie Turner-Smith, Rebecca Henderson, Dean-Charles Chapman, Joonas Suotamo, and Carrie-Anne Moss. Star Wars: The Acolyte premieres on Disney+ on June 4th.

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