This week has led to heartbreaking news for Star Wars fans. Specifically, the Disney+ series Star Wars: Acolyte has not been renewed for second season. “Most of the cast hasn’t posted anything about the news until Manny Jacinto (The Good Place, Nine Perfect Strangers), who portrayed the characters of Qimir and The Stranger, shared his thoughts on the saddening news with a tearful Instagram post, Comicbook.com reports. Jacinto shared a picture of him and his co-star Amandla Stenberg (The Hunger Games, The Hate U Give), who played the character of Osha, a heart emoji being the only caption, as seen in the post below.
According to Comicbook.com, the most loved couple in the show was the one made of Jacinto and Stenberg’s characters, named affectionately “Oshamir” by fans. Jacinto shared his thoughts on the show’s finale and what it meant for the shippers of the couple.
“In the fan art I’ve seen, there’s a good amount that implies… something between Osha and the Stranger,” Jacinto explained in an interview with GQ via Comicbook.com. “That’s something that people, I think, have been yearning for in this genre, or at least in this IP, and I love that people are honing in on it and encouraging it. So I think people can look forward to more of that, possibly. If people want it, we can explore that in a subsequent season.”
Furthermore, according to Comicbook.com, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Stenberg shared the possibility of a romance between the two fan-beloved characters.
“That was Manny’s idea,” Stenberg shared via Comicbook.com. “We pitched a lot of different things, and now we’re getting tons of shippers, of course, on Twitter and Tumblr and people who are now calling it Oshamir. And they really wanted to see some romantic arc take place with Qimir and Osha, which totally get it. And that was the original vision.”
“But as we arrived to that point in filming, again, we returned to Osha’s choices and this sense of it feeling autonomous, and we just came to the decision that we didn’t feel like a romantic resolution was quite earned yet. And we also wanted Osha’s journey to be autonomous from that arc. And so we decided, ‘Okay, you know what? Let’s table it for now,'” she added via Comicbook.com.
“We also just felt like there was a lot of weight and significance in the political alignment that’s happening between those two characters, and Osha internally reaching this place that Qimir has been pushing her towards. We wanted to keep the focus on that, and we were like, ‘What’s some sort of symbol that we can utilize that connotes a political alignment between them and this union?’ But also there’s a lot of intimacy in that sort of shared vision and power, and Manny came up with instead of holding hands, they’re going to hold the lightsaber together, which we just thought was awesome,” she continued via Comicbook.com.
“He would pitch things like that all the time. Whenever there is intimacy or physical representations of their intimacy, a lot of it was Manny’s idea, and we just leaned in,” she concluded via Comicbook.com.
“When Stenberg was asked to explain if there has ever been a Dark Side romance in a live-action before, she stated, via Comicbook.com, “Yeah, totally. And I think that’s just also Leslye’s [Headland] sensibilities. [Laughs] Leslye is a Sith and I’m a Scorpio, and so I think that appeals to both of us. Also, because of where we exist in the timeline, it makes it more interesting to explore that kind of intimate connection because the Sith exists in the underbelly of the universe, and so they are not the dominating forces of the universe at that point, which I think is kind of more fodder for what is an underdog relationship like at this point in the timeline.”
The first season of Star Wars: The Acolyte is now available to stream on Disney+.