How The Acolyte’s Manny Jacinto Brought Sexy Back to Star Wars

Ultimately, of course, what truly renders the Stranger so instantly iconic is his carnality. (He puts the “seduced” in “seduced by the dark side of the force,” if you will.) It’s a difficult tightrope to walk—murdering Jedi at will and still coming off as sympathetic and likable—but Jacinto pulls it off with aplomb, gradually building a tantalizing bond with Osha through his subtle allure. “He’s like that high school bad boy,” Jacinto says. “He just minds his own business. He’s not pulling you, he’s not telling you to come and be with him. He’s just living his own life, and you wind up intrigued by what he’s doing.”

That raw magnetism might be the reason there’s already more than enough Stranger fan art online for Jacinto to fill an Instagram carousel, but it’s not why the actor loves the character so deeply. “I think the best part about the Stranger is that he’s [this avatar for] not feeling accepted in a society that you’re trying so hard to fit into,” he explains. “He just wants to exist. He wants to be able to express himself in this world, yet society is constantly telling him that he can’t.

“Leslye has expressed that she’s always felt that way as a female showrunner, as a lesbian in this industry, that sometimes people don’t take her seriously,” Jacinto continues. “She’s constantly had to prove herself in an industry that isn’t very open to people like her—or like myself. Having an Asian identity and fitting into American [society], fitting into Hollywood—I’ve had to fight so hard to fit in. And that’s a huge aspect of the Stranger.”

Jacinto has yet to fully process all the ways in which The Acolyte might just have changed his life. He’s been focusing on acting, keeping all social media apps off his phone—he periodically downloads Instagram to post work-related stuff before deleting it again—and spending as much downtime with his wife and pup as possible.

(It’s that devotion to his family, Headland says, that won her over initially. “Someone may be perfect for a role but you still need to meet them to see if they have a good vibe. Of course Manny was lovely and sweet. But at the hour mark of the meeting, he got a text from his wife (not urgent) and said ‘I have to go. It was very nice meeting you.’ It was endearing because I feel the same way about my wife. That cinched it for me. He walked out the door with the part.”)

For all the chatter about his charisma and physique on social media, Jacinto still has trouble buying into his own hype. “I think whether it be being Asian, or Filipino, or Canadian,” he says, “there’s always going to be this sense of always being in disbelief that people actually find you attractive.”

And when I proffer that perhaps the buzz around this performance might now allow him the ability to pick and choose his roles going forward, he corrects me. “I mean, that’s the dream,” he says, “but I don’t know. Maybe it’s my lack of faith in this industry, but the people of color who find success, I feel like they still have to work at it and continue to fight for roles. The people I look up to—if you look at Steven Yeun, or Kumail Nanjiani, or even Donald Glover—they all had to, in some shape or form, create [projects for themselves] in order to continue to have a platform. Or even look at Dev Patel! He’s a huge star, but he had to make Monkey Man himself [to get an action role like that], and that was even shelved at one point. That’s crazy to me. So that’s why I have this caution towards whether or not the industry will move things forward for my career. If anything, it fuels me to try and create things on my own terms and hopefully lead projects that way.”