TAGGED AS: Star Wars, streaming, TV
At Star Wars Celebration in London two years ago, attendees witnessed a startling sight of cosplay: a group of young men all dressed in the white, loose-fitting prisoner outfits from Andor lining up at the far end of the Excel London convention center. After pictures were taken, the group all began to rush toward the one set of exit doors in the facility while shouting a memorable phrase from the middle episodes of the Star Wars series’ first season: “One way out!”
Remembering Andor is an increasingly common activity among its fans as the new season debuts in just over a month. Disney, meanwhile, has put the first three episodes of the premiere season on YouTube for all to see (with the whole season also available on Hulu) and recently uploaded a 15-minute recap of moments like “One Way Out.” As it happens, Rotten Tomatoes had a chance to catch up with Andor executive producer Tony Gilroy to reminisce about a few moments from the first 12 episodes of the program and take a look forward to some of the things coming up in season 2.
Gilroy also recalled being at Star Wars Celebration London and taking a photo with that group of cosplayers. “It was fantastic,” he said. Nonetheless, he was surprised by how much of a life the line took on after the episode streamed on Disney+. “You don’t really know what people are going to jump on so much,” he explained. “The line that finishes the episode right before … ‘How many guards are there? Never more than 12.’ It was a good button line for the episode, but that caught momentum I hadn’t anticipated.”
Beyond the momentum of the prison episodes, Andor’s first season also featured key phrases like “power doesn’t panic,” Luthen Rael’s (Stellan Skarsgård) proclamation that he will “burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see,” and — perhaps most impactful for older Star Wars fans — the one word suggestion that Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) simply “try.”
In the context of the series, “try” was meant to motivate Cassian, and anyone else who might read young Karis Nemik’s (Alex Lawther) manifesto, to rally against the Galactic Empire. But for those who embrace Yoda’s (Frank Oz) more binary “do or do not” mantra from The Empire Strikes Back, the inclusion of “try” created a new dimension in the philosophical underpinnings of Star Wars. Although, Gilroy maintains the Jedi’s thinking “wasn’t even on my radar” when Nemik’s message, as heard in voiceover toward the end of the third episode, was written.
“I can’t even say that it was an unconscious decision because it wasn’t something that I was really trying to refute or challenge in any way,” he said. “But it’s fascinating that it comes up. It shows you how rich the material really is and how much it can sustain.”
Looking forward to season 2, Andor changes its format ever so slightly when it debuts on April 22. Whereas the first season told four stories across one year of Cassian’s life, the second 12-episode season tells several stories across the four remaining years Cass has left before that fateful sunset on Scarif (as seen in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story). As Gilroy put it, the change was a practical one: “It was physically impossible [to continue at that pace].”
Luna himself even joked over the years that he would be a much older man than he appeared in Rogue One if they continued to make the series at the speed of the first season.
Luckily for Gilroy, season one also presented the solution to their problem — every three episodes constituted its own story as Cassian moved ever closer to joining the Rebellion. The show was also produced in three-episode blocks with different directors prepping and filming each story. Thus, for season 2, as the producer put it, “We have to cover four years, and we have four blocks. Then you start to sketch on that.
“The challenge is the negative space. What are you going to do with that year-long absence in between, and are you going to try to finesse it or are you going to just go for it?” Gilroy continued. “My default starting point is always to try to really go for it… What happens if we drop the needle on three days [of story], a year apart each time, and try not to spoon-feed all the catching up?”
Although Gilroy said Andor was never meant to be an “experiment for techniques,” the opportunity presented itself to test the format and push for something unusual even in Star Wars storytelling. “It was really a gas to try to work that up. So, we’re happy about that,” he said.
Then there’s the ultimate experiment at the core of Andor: Viewers already know the ultimate end of Cass’s story.
“Limitations are liberating creatively, by and large,” Gilroy said. “And this one, this is the perfect frame because only one of the characters is going where he’s going. And we have 15, 20 other people that we care about and 10 of them that we really care about. And that choir is really, in many ways, it’s the more complicated and more meaty part of the show.”
One of those choir members is Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), the Chandrilan aristocrat who is already deeply involved in bankrolling the nascent Rebellion while keeping the Empire of her trail. According to Gilroy, both the character and her cousin, Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay), “arrived at a social conscience that’s at a level that they really feel compelled to do what they do” some time before the series began — though he admitted that both he, O’Reilly, and Marsay never had a conversation about the source of the characters’ social awareness.
“It would be a really fascinating thing to tell Mon and Vel: the early years,” he said.
At the same time, it felt natural to him that a few of the elites on the core world would care enough to go against the Empire. “Certainly, throughout history, that’s been a common character, whether you go back to ancient Rome — the Roman elite who became Christians in defiance of everything that was going on around them.” He also pointed to a more recent example in our world: the Red Army Faction, aka, the Baader-Meinhof Group. They were militant leftists who grew up affluent in West Germany, but considered their parents’ generation complacent during the Nazi era. Although Mon is less radicalized than the RAF, she is nonetheless a singular character in terms of a privileged person who joins a cause that also carries out violent actions.
Gilroy was quick to point out, though, that many of the Rebel characters still await the true test of their devotion. “You don’t have to find out how committed you are to true belief until things get difficult,” he explained. “It’s just always waiting and something happens and, suddenly, there’s Huns invading and your city is under siege, or suddenly the king is dead, or whatever the thing that happens — it forces people to suddenly be in over their heads.
“The interesting thing about this show is that you have a bunch of people who probably would be very happy going through their lives without ever confronting that question, but they don’t have a choice.” Nonetheless, the question is coming for the characters even as the Rebel Alliance starts to coalesce into the fighting force seen on Scarif in Rogue One and, of course, mounting the fight against the Death Star in the original Star Wars.
“It’s a pretty diverse and complicated group of people,” Gilroy said of the alliance just before the attack on Scarif in Rogue One. “They certainly disagree in Rogue, don’t they?” That image from the film is also an end point Andor must get to in the remaining three years of story.
“The fortunate thing is that the getting there really helps the adventure. It helps the intrigue. It helps the idea that you may meet somebody — you and I may meet, and we may be Rebels, but we may not agree on much of anything else. We may agree on who we hate, but we are not in agreement about anything. How are we going to work together?” This is a question Cassian, Luthen, Mon, Vel, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) and others will face in the season ahead.
Gilroy also introduced another question about Syril Karn’s convictions. “I don’t know if Syril is a true believer,” he said of the character now allied with the Empire. “The commitments that people make to the positions that they take on, the actions that they take is part of the show. How they feel about it, how far it stretches them, how much it costs.” Is it possible the character who seemed so sure about things is still weighing the cost of his alliances? Of course, that interrogative underscores the element of the Empire Gilroy finds most compelling: the people propping it up.
“I have a great interest in how human behavior,” he explained. “Getting a really good parking space might be more important to some people than being able to quote the Imperial Constitution. What are people’s primary motivations? How do I get that corner office? How do I get a bigger salary? How do I get a whiter uniform? How do I get that credential? How do I get promoted? So I’m fascinated by what that does inside of an organization that has such a deeply powerful momentum to it.”
But one question Cassian faces that many never get resolved is that of his past. As the first season revealed, Cass was taken from Kenari by Maarva Andor (Fiona Shaw) and raised on Ferrix, leaving behind a sister and whole life. Although it is possible more details about the past may surface in the remaining 12 episodes, Gilroy said, “We all carry things that are unresolved, that motivate us in interesting ways. So, I think how his childhood motivates him is far more interesting to me than closing some circle of some mystery.”
One thing fans of Rogue One can look forward to, though, is the moment Cass means K-S2O (Alan Tudyk), the reprogrammed Imperial security droid who won the hearts of many via his Rogue One appearance. Gilroy hopes the moment will be unexpected even if fans know it is imminent. “I am fully aware of the bar that I have laid down about how to make this reunion,” he said.
“If we’re going to wait this long, [then] there were reasons for doing it,” he explained. “But if you’re going to make people wait this long, it better be good when it gets there.”
Andor’s second season, along with Rogue One, is the culmination of a decade’s worth of work for Gilroy as he charted his own corner of the Star Wars galaxy, with the series representing “five and a half years of just deep immersion.” And though he found a lot to love there, he thinks it may be time to “try something else” in another narrative reality. Maybe even one closer to home. At the same time, he is immensely proud of the series, saying, “I’m sure this will be the most important piece of work I ever get to do. So, I’m very proud and we’re very eager to share it.”
Gilroy and select members of the Andor team will continue to talk about the first season during a re-watch event of key moments on March 13. Starting at noon Pacific, he will also answer questions from fans.
Andor: Season 2 premieres on Disney+ on April 22, 2025.
Thumbnail image by Des Willie/©Lucasfilm
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