Lee Jung-jae is super bummed The Acolyte is canceled, despite [REDACTED]

[This article contains spoilers for the first—i.e. only—season of The Acolyte.]

It’s normal, in the course of this business called show, for an actor to be bummed when their TV show gets canceled. Un-canceled TV shows are one of the primary ways TV actors make money (alongside lucrative influencer deals, and personal appearance fees at mall openings), and when the shows they are in are canceled, those checks tend to dry up pretty quickly. [Note to editor: Check whether this is true.] It’s rarer, though, to see a response like that of Squid Game and The Acolyte star Lee Jung-jae, who expressed some pretty sincere sadness this week at his Star Wars series getting the axe at Disney+, despite, well…

Y’all have seen the last episode of The Acolyte, right?

It’s honestly kind of sweet: Lee, who was talking to Entertainment Weekly about the show’s sudden, and surprising, Force Choke into oblivion, made it clear that his disappointment in it not getting a second season comes purely from a fan’s point of view, i.e., he just really wanted to watch what his co-stars, and series head Leslye Headland, were going to do next:

As you know, my character had died already in the first season. So I wouldn’t have appeared in the second season if there was one anyway. But personally speaking, I really loved Leslye’s writing. I thought that she was a great writer and director who was very talented in the storytelling, as well as creating characters and creating meaningful structures within the story. So I was actually personally really looking forward to watching a season 2 with her at the helm.

Lee also expressed a pretty common reaction to news of the cancellation, which came down less than a week ago after the series seemed to have a pretty strong grip on the cultural conversation. (Admittedly, some of that was fans being typically baby-ish/god-awful about non-white protagonists, or narratives suggesting that the Jedi are frequently just incompetent space cops who don’t actually know how to protect the universe, but that’s, like, baseline online Star Wars stuff at this point.) “To hear the news, I was quite surprised personally as well,” Lee noted, adding that he’s still holding out hope that someone at Disney might change their mind. “Honestly, I am hoping that maybe there could be changes in the future. Because you never know what’s going to happen. So on a personal level, I really hope we could get to see further stories of Leslye’s second season.”