‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’ exclusive first photos of Dafne Keen’s Jecki Lon

She’s half-human, half-Theelin, and all Jedi. Well, Jedi Padawan, at least. Jecki Lon will play a key role on Star Wars: The Acolyte, which debuts June 4 on Disney+, and Entertainment Weekly has the exclusive first photos of the character in action. Not only that, but we spoke with the woman playing her, Logan’s Dafne Keen, who shares some insight and intel on the character.

The Padawan to Lee Jung-jae’s Jedi Master Sol, Jecki Lon will find herself engaged with a mysterious new threat to the Jedi Order. And show creator Leslye Headland was insistent on getting Keen to play the part. “We have to get Dafne, period,” Headland previously told EW. “I just wanted to see X23 with a lightsaber in their hand. That has to happen.”

Check out the exclusive photos below as well as our interview with Keen, who was keen to chat about the first on-screen entry from Star Wars’ High Republic era.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So what can you tell us about Jecki Lon?

DAFNE KEEN: Well, I’m very excited that we know her name now, because it was secret for so long. And I’m very happy that I get to say that she’s an alien and that she’s a Padawan and that she’s a Jedi. She’s a mixed species — part Theelin, part human. She’s very cool and I have some very cool fights I do with the lightsaber. I really love her. She’s a great character and was really fun to play. I’m very excited that the trailer came out. I was buzzing for days.  

Jecki is Sol’s Padawan, so what kind of Padawan is she and what is her relationship like with her master?

I’d say she is a very dedicated Padawan. She’s definitely in awe of him in a very kind of sweet way. She thinks the absolute world of him in a way that I think they have a very sweet relationship, but she’s much more aware of the authority difference than, for example, Obi-Wan and Anakin. She’s very much like, “No, he’s the master and I’m the Padawan and he’s perfect. And everything he says, I have to follow to the T.”

So what was the makeup process like playing a Theelin?

It was an hour and a half, two hours in the morning. So I’d usually get picked up at 3:30 AM, and then I’d go in, and the wonderful makeup artists Rob and Jeremy would just sit me in this chair and I’d get a bald cap on me that went from my eyebrows on my head up and would cover all my hair.

And then I had a piece of prosthetic that went over my eyebrows and my head to cover a bald surface, and then I’d get airbrushed white, and then I’d get freckles airbrushed on me, and I’d get horns stuck on me. And my wig and my hands had to be painted, my nails had to be painted — if any parts of my body were revealed, they had to be air brushed.

It was honestly really fun. I loved the whole process of it. It was really freeing not having my face. It was really nice to just show up at work and be in someone else’s face. It was really enjoyable and it completely changed my approach to the character once I was in the makeup and changed the way I moved and everything. And also having horns on you is actually a safety hazard, so I can’t hug people on set, which is quite weird. [Laughs]

So did the makeup just totally just change the way you carried yourself?

100 percent. It completely changed how I moved. It also completely changed the character. When I read the script, I had one idea of what I was going to do, and it completely changed it in a way that I think is much more interesting than what I thought.

I thought she was going to be really methodical and cold and calculated, and then as soon as I was in that makeup, she became much more still methodical and a perfectionist and high achiever, but with much more of an ingenuity and a curiosity and a true love for the craft that is being a Jedi. Which was really interesting because I am someone who moves their eyebrows a lot, and not having eyebrows completely changes the expression on your face. And not having eyebrows gave me a sort of sweeter appearance, which completely changed the character in a way.

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Tell me about your conversations with showrunner Leslye Headland in terms of what she told you about her vision for the show and your character in particular.

Leslye is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever worked with. She’s such an interesting director in the sense that she has an innate trust with actors and her crew that it makes you trust her more. She’s so confident in the people she’s hiring and she has such a broad understanding of Star Wars and of cinema in general that I truly feel like I would follow that woman to the trenches.

We had a lot of conversations about Jecki, but ultimately she was very good at being like, “This is what I know for a fact, and then I’m going to give you space to think about what you want for your character.” I’d always run everything past her because she has such a brilliant mind, and we spoke a lot. I was very stunt focused, so I spoke to her a lot about how she wanted the character to get reflected within her fight styles.

A lot of Jecki was created through her relationships with the people that surround her, so there was a lot of that of us talking about what her bonds with the other Jedi are. And I was completely sold from minute one with Leslye. We hopped on a Zoom call and she told me that it was a mystery, kind of thrillery series where you go finding out more and more about the show as the episodes go on. Her whole take on Star Wars felt like if a true fan was writing a Star Wars show, which felt really exciting, and also just a very fresh take. The way that Leslye wrote this mystery-thriller was so fascinating to me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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