Nearly two months later, Disney’s cancellation of The Acolyte still leaves a bad taste in the mouths of Star Wars fans. Some of its stars have spoken about their feelings on the show’s end after a single season, and now it’s Jodie Turner-Smith (who played Aniseya, the mother of twins Mae and Osha) that had some words on the matter–and they’re not kind toward Disney.
In a recent Glamour Magazine interview, she criticized Disney for basically leaving the show’s cast—namely Amandla Stenberg, who pulled double duty as the twins—to deal with weeks of racist abuse on their own. Speaking bluntly, she said studios “have got to stop doing this thing where they don’t say anything when people are getting fucking dog-piled on the internet with racism and bullshit. It would just be nice if the people that have all the money were showing their support and putting their feet down.”
Speaking about Stenberg specifically, Turner-Smith had glowing praise for the young actor, who she said “handed me an essay on their character. The Virgo in me was just like, ‘Yass, I’m living for this!’ […] Amandla put so much care and thought and love into that, and it’s disappointing to feel like your studio is not having your back in a very public-facing way.”
Star Wars and fandom harassment are old friends, and stars like John Boyega and Moses Ingram have been caught in the crossfire, and while Lucasfilm, at least initially, seemed ready to defend The Acolyte from similar bad-faith attacks in the run-up to launch, both the studio and its parent company Disney remained silent as the show’s cast and crew weathered multiple waves of online abuse. At a time when toxic fandom can be lucrative on its own, how do you fight that? If Turner-Smith had her way, studios would come forward and explicitly deem this behavior unacceptable. To her, such a statement wouldn’t affect the bottom line that much or at all, since “people of colour, and especially Black people, make up a very large percentage of buying power. They might find that it’s actually more lucrative for them.”
Despite the bad situation around The Acolyte’s end, Turner-Smith hopes toxic fandoms and their racist behavior get shut out. “We’re gonna get there at some point,” she stated, “to that place where people stop having a stick up their arse about people of colour being a part of IPs that were created by white people. You know why? Because we’re never going to fucking stop participating.”
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