Dafne Keen on her Star Wars debut: “‘The Acolyte’ is about power and identity”

At 19, Dafne Keen is already onto her third iconic franchise. The Spanish-British actress – full name Dafne Keen Fernández – made a spectacular breakthrough in 2017’s Logan, the grittiest and probably best X-Men movie ever. As Laura Kinney, the vulnerable but violent daughter of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, 11-year-old Keen scorched the screen with smart physicality and minimal dialogue. “I didn’t realise at the time how much creative chemistry Hugh and I had,” she says today. “I thought that acting with anyone was going to be that easy, but in the years since I’ve realised it’s really rare and special.”

Two years later, Keen landed the lead in His Dark Materials, a lavish BBC/HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman’s book trilogy. Playing headstrong heroine Lyra Belacqua, who ventures across parallel universes alongside best friend Will Parry (Amir Wilson), was a hefty undertaking with a lot of pressure. “I started filming [the show] when I was 13 and the last episode came out when I was 18 – that’s my entire adolescence basically,” she recalls. “Inhabiting that character for so long, she kind of grew up with me.”

Now Keen is taking her place in arguably the biggest franchise of all: Star Wars. In The Acolyte, an eight-part series set around 100 years before the events of 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, she plays a young padawan – or apprentice Jedi – called Jecki Lon. The Acolyte debuts on Disney+ on June 4, but it’s being kept so secret that when NME speaks to Keen in mid-May, we’re not allowed to watch it first.

Thankfully, Keen is an old pro at dodging spoilers after Logan and three seasons of His Dark Materials. Speaking over Zoom from a New York hotel room, she’s relaxed, chatty and unaffected for someone who was – ostensibly at least – a “child star”. When NME‘s internet cuts out during the final question, she waits for us to rejoin even though we’re well over our allotted time.

She’s also quick to share her thoughts on Challengers, the blistering tennis film currently dominating social media. She says she “audibly gasped and grabbed my mum’s arm” during the sweaty climactic battle between two racket-wielding rivals. “I’m so glad [stars] Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor are getting their flowers,” she adds sweetly. “I’ve known about those guys for years and they’re some of the best [actors] in this generation.”

But first, she deftly discusses The Acolyte. Created by Leslye Headland (Russian Doll), it follows respected Jedi Master Sol (Squid Game‘s Lee Jung-jae) as he digs into a spate of crimes that pit him against Mae (Amandla Stenberg), a dangerous renegade from his past. “It’s really about the social negotiation of power and identity – and where you fit into that [negotiation],” Keen says. “The way Leslye decided to explore that is through setting it in the High Republic Era [of Star Wars lore] and the premises of Jediism.”

“My Star Wars character looks like alien David Bowie”

Keen teases a meaty coming-of-age arc for her character Jecki, who is Sol’s apprentice. “When we meet her, she’s kind of the perfect student,” the actress says. “But she’s lacking experience and lacking errors in a way – it’s kind of to her detriment that she’s so perfect. So I think, as the series goes on – and as she meets a certain character who obviously I won’t [name] – it allows her to not be perfect, which really makes her grow.”

Keen got into character by blasting classic David Bowie bangers including ‘Space Oddity’, ‘Starman’ and ‘Changes’. “I thought Jecki was cool [in her tastes] like that. She’s young but an old soul,” she says. “And also, Leslye and I have a running joke that Jecki looks like the alien version of David Bowie.” The character’s pale face and orange eye make-up definitely echo Bowie’s iconic ‘Aladdin Sane’ album cover.

The show’s pre-release materials introduce Jecki as someone who “projects calm and conducts herself with maturity”. Could this also describe Keen? “I think in a way I do conduct myself with maturity,” she says after a pause. “But I’m like the anti-calm – I’ve been described by multiple people as a hurricane! But I do think that the fact that I’ve been working since I was nine years old… that sort of snaps you into adulthood very early.”

Whereas Jecki is “zen”, Keen calls herself “a very on-edge person intrinsically”. An actor’s life contains plenty to put anyone on-edge – all those auditions with no guarantee of a part – but Keen relishes the unpredictability. “It’s kind of perfect – I’d go crazy if I had a nine-to-five. And I’m incapable of planning anything ever,” she says. “What’s good about acting is that production companies are kind of like me – they’ll cast you a week before you start filming. Like, one day I was in London, then I was in Toronto for three months [making the upcoming horror film Whistle]”.

Keen is also comfortable with the emotional rollercoaster of acting for a living because she was born into it. Her dad is English actor Will Keen, who played conniving Father Hugh McPhail in His Dark Materials, and her mum is Spanish actress María Fernández Ache – who has worked extensively in the theatre. “Dinner table conversations would be, like, my dad giving my mum notes on the play she’d just written,” Keen recalls fondly.

Once she decided to follow in their footsteps, Keen had no delusions of grandeur. “My first thought was, ‘I want to do auditions’ because that’s what I saw my parents do all the time,” she says. “They’d book, like, 0.5% of what they were auditioning for, so I knew I was going to be auditioning [rather than] working – that was out of the question.” Keen’s first ever audition, when she was nine, went so “terribly wrong” that she left the room crying. But she dusted herself off, put herself forward for something else, and “somehow booked it”.

That first job was 2014’s The Refugees, a high-concept sci-fi series made by the BBC with Spanish broadcasting giant Atresmedia. Keen would only get each script at the start of the episode in question, so she didn’t know (spoiler warning) that her character Abi was going to die until the series finale was ready to roll. “I was so heartbroken because, as a nine-year-old, it’s very difficult to separate reality from fiction,” she says. “I remember feeling like a friend of mine had died.”

Still, Keen wasn’t daunted by her gory death scene, which showed Abi being killed by her dad – played by her real-life dad Will. “It was such a fun day for me – my character had to cough up blood so they put strawberry-flavoured [fake] blood in my mouth,” Keen recalls with relish. “But my dad had a really hard time because he had to shoot me in the back, which was horrible for him. And let me tell you, Spanish people do not give a fuck about [age ] ratings. They showed that scene on daytime TV [in Spain].”

If Keen’s first acting gig was intense, her second was simply massive. When she was 11, she entered a “scavenger hunt”-like audition process involving “five or six self-tapes” that she eventually gleaned was for the Wolverine movie Logan. “I choreographed my own little stunt sequences before the scene itself, which I think they liked, but when I got into the chemistry audition with Hugh [Jackman], I fumbled it,” she says. “But I asked to go back in and I did some improv and booked it.”

“I fumbled my chemistry audition with Hugh Jackman”

Keen says she was aware of the superhero movie’s scale, but was too young to be intimidated by her household name co-stars. “I remember not knowing who Richard E. Grant was. I did know who Stephen [Merchant] was because my parents loved The Office,” she says. Working with Jackman, one of Hollywood’s nice guys, left an abiding impression. “He’s a team player and does so much for the whole crew,” she says. “I’ve worked with enough big people now to know that’s not normal. Hugh would eat his meals in the catering tent. Cast [members] usually eat in their trailer. Cast as huge as Hugh definitely eat in their trailer.”

At Logan‘s climax, Wolverine dies from a bullet wound while Keen’s Laura tearfully holds him. Will it be weird seeing her on-screen dad back from the dead in this summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine? “I think it’s exciting,” she says brightly. “It’s so exciting to maybe see Wolverine in a goofy scenario with another character who’s so over-the-top and hilarious.”

Since she won rave reviews for Logan in 2017, Keen has only taken on a handful of projects: His Dark Materials (which was admittedly a long-term commitment); the low-key 2020 road movie Ana, BBC horror podcast The Battersea Poltergeist, and now The Acolyte and Whistle. Is it fair to say she’s been pretty selective? “Yeah, I’ve said no to a lot of things – I think I am very picky,” she replies. “After Logan all I was getting offered was horror films and feral children [roles]. But I was like, ‘I’ve done that.'”

Because she has mainly acted in stories set in heightened and fantastical worlds, Keen says she’s now craving a role that’s “properly gritty and real”. Beyond that, she knows which bracket of actors she’d like to be grouped with. “I hope when people see my name [on a poster] they get as excited as I get when I see Taylor Russell or Josh O’Connor or Mike Faist – like, cool, young, talented actors,” she says. “I’m not saying I’m talented… but when I see Taylor Russell’s name, I’m always like: ‘I’m 1,000 per cent gonna watch that.’ So I’d love for people to think that when they see me.”

‘The Acolyte’ premieres June 4 on Disney +

IMAGES: David Reiss

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