Late last week Altar boy, the Master showed up and proved to everyone that he meant business, effortlessly throwing away everyone on the Light side of the Force with the flick of a wrist. This week, The acolyte goes straight ahead and shows us the true power of the Sith Lord (and surprised that Sol doesn’t remember him…). Of course, we didn’t need to see the Master in action to know how vicious a Sith Lord they were. Their look told us enough.
As you might expect, that’s inherent in the design of Jennifer Bryan, the costume designer of The acolyteWhen designing the mask with Star Wars creature designer Neal Scanlan, they knew it had to align with the aesthetic of the Star Wars Dark Side, while also feeling like something new.
“My department had a lot of concepts because for the character, everything has to look symbiotic; masks, cloak, everything has to work together,” Bryan tells Polygon, noting how grateful she is for the high level of collaboration between Star Wars departments. The goal, as with many Sith, was simple: communicate danger.
Image: Lucasfilm
“It had to be threatening. It had to be dark. And it had to be something you’ve never seen before, but there was something familiar about it.”
There was some hammering on details; Bryan says previous mockups emphasized different parts of the face, like the eyes. But for the final point, she drew on two specific sources: She gave the helmet a flared brim at the base of the neck, to evoke (who else) Darth Vader. “It’s going to subconsciously register (with) the audience that this is a guy you should be paying attention to,” she says, citing him and Darth Maul as two points of Star Wars inspiration.
But the defining feature – that wide, Venom-esque grin – came from another place entirely.
“Leslye (headland, The acolyte(showrunner) says she was thinking of the bad bunny Donnie Darko,” says Bryan. “There was something grotesque about that. (…) I think the idea that Leslye wanted was that you would get a sense of dread when (you) finally see this character up close.