The official Star Wars site just posted a beautiful new video of Stenberg, who stars in the upcoming The Acolyte, playing the violin, something they’ve been doing since childhood. But what’s special about this video though is that John Williams himself not only approved Stenberg to play the piece, he also wrote them a specific new version optimized for solo violin. Which basically means you’ve heard the Star Wars theme a billion times, but never quite like this. Check it out.
The Acolyte | Amandla & Her Violin | Streaming June 4 on Disney+
Well, that was amazing. And we’re hoping Stenberg is equally as amazing as Mae, their character on The Acolyte which is coming sooner than you think on June 4. Mae is described by the official Star Wars site as someone who “gets swept up into a sinister mystery—one that puts her into the center of a conflict in unexpected ways.” We imagine that will be expanded out mightily in the coming months.
As for Williams, as far as we know, his music isn’t in The Acolyte (the composer for the show is Get Out’s Michael Abels), but hopefully, we get a theme here and there. The show, which co-stars Lee Jung-jae, Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Charlie Barnett, Jodie Turner-Smith, Rebecca Henderson, Dean-Charles Chapman, Joonas Suotamo, and Carrie-Anne Moss, premieres with two episodes on June 4. Are you as excited as we are?
2018’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story” may not have done too well at the box office, but one enduring highlight from it is Donald Glover’s performance as Lando Calrissian. The smooth-talking, cape-wearing smuggler effortlessly stole every scene he was in, which is why conversations about a Lando-focused spinoff have been swirling for years.
In December 2020, Disney announced that a series centered around Lando was in the works with “Haunted Mansion” director Justin Simien as showrunner. However, Simien wound up exiting the project and Donald and his brother, Stephen Glover, took over, per The Hollywood Reporter. During a Sept. 14 appearance on the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” Stephen revealed that the project is now a movie being made in partnership with Lucasfilm. “It’s not even a show . . . the idea right now is to do a movie. Right now, because of the strike, it’s kind of like telephone, all of the information,” he said. Reps for Lucasfilm did not immediately respond to POPSUGAR’s request for comment.
Donald briefly discussed the project in an April interview with GQ, though remained evasive about its status. “I would love to play Lando again. It’s a fun time, being him. It just has to be the right way to do it. Time is precious. The past couple of years, this pandemic sh*t, it really had people experience time . . . People realize their time is valuable. You only get so much. I’m not interested in doing anything that’s going to be a waste of my time or just a paycheck,” he said. “I’d much rather spend time with people that I enjoy. It just has to be the right thing, and I think it could be. Lando is definitely somebody I like to hang out with.”
While we likely won’t see Donald in all his caped glory for quite a while, especially given the ongoing SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, you can always travel back 40 years ago to Billy Dee Williams’s original take on the character in “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” for more Lando content. Donald has also kept busy in the years since debuting as Lando, working on everything from “Atlanta” and “Swarm” to a forthcoming remake of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
Back in March, legendary Elden Ring player Let Me Solo Her took on a challenge of unthinkable proportions: finishing a run in which every single enemy was Malenia. We’ve seen him slay this fearsome boss countless times, but surely this would be too much Malenia to overcome, even for him. Oh, who am I kidding? Of course he conquered the challenge. Roughly 24 hours ago, on April 25, Let Me Solo Her wrapped his 10-hour playthrough of the “Everything is Malenia” run, having documented the whole journey on stream for the world to watch.
Blade’s Book Club Is The Best Thing About Marvel’s Midnight Suns
Let Me Solo Her, as his name implies, made waves by appearing in other players’ games to take on one of the game’s most grueling bosses, Malenia, Blade of Miquella, on his own. His remarkable feats of Elden Ring mastery even earned him a sword from the game’s publisher, Bandai Namco. Having defeated Malenia so many times, Let Me Solo Her set his sights on beating the game using a mod that replaced every single enemy, from the easily dispatched Godrick Soldiers to the games toughest bosses, with Malenia. And of course he had to do so wearing nothing but the jar helmet and imposing other restrictions on his run, like a refusal to level up Vigor, which affects how much damage your character can take. Let Me Solo Her is now taking another victory lap and by god, he deserves it.
10 hours, many deaths, many crashes, and no vigor
“Took about 10 hours,” Let Me Solo Her says in his victory tweet, “and probably more deaths than I’d like to admit but I finally finished the Everything is Malenia Run!”
While he admits that he died more than he would’ve cared to, and that the whole no leveling vigor thing may have been a bit much, you could tell he had fun doing it from the five-part stream documenting the journey.
The challenge proved tough even for someone as skilled and experienced as Let Me Solo Her, but it was even harder on his PC, which crashed a few times trying to keep up with such a wild and demanding mod. Things got particularly rough in part three of the stream, where Let Me Solo Her said he had to configure the game at “the lowest setting possible” to keep it running. And mind you, as he said when the game first crashed in part one, he’s running an RTX 4080 in his computer—that’s a $1,200 graphics card.
’I’m not sadistic, I just like this one particular boss’
Watching the Malenia-only streams, it’s hard not to think that Let Me Solo Her enjoys being cruel to himself. I mean, you can hear the pain in his voice at the conclusion of stream two as he takes on Draconic Malenia, the mod’s replacement for the Draconic Tree Sentinel.
But Let Me Solo Her assured the chat in the following stream that this wasn’t an act of sadism. That said, he did say that the Malenia-only run was “hard, way harder than I thought it would be.” However, moments later he nonetheless told the chat, “You guys should try this by the way. It’s very, very fun.”
FromSoftware / Let me solo her
In the finale, Let Me Solo Her admitted that he had lost count of how many times he died. In the first stream alone, he said, “I think [I died] at least 20-something [times].”
Persisting through all those deaths, though, Let Me Solo Her finally took down Elden Malenia, the replacement for the game’s final boss: Elden Beast. Thanking all his viewers, he expressed excitement at the upcoming DLC…and we can’t wait to see what feats of stunning heroism he pulls off when that drops.
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