Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy talks to Vanity Fair about the 12-episode show, set to launch on Disney+ later this summer, and corrects a few rumors about the show that have circulated among the fans.
For instance, don’t expect Alan Tudyk’s blunt-speaking droid, K-2SO. “We don’t have Alan Tudyk,” Gilroy confirms. “Not yet, anyway.” But fear not. Prep for a second season is already underway, and the story of how Cassian Andor met that former Imperial battle droid may be told then. “It is a second season, but it’s really, for me, the second half of the novel,” Gilroy says. “This first season is about him becoming a revolutionary, and the second 12 episodes take him into Rogue One.”
They also say the series will make Star Wars obsessives reevaluate key tenets they have come to believe—all while trying to draw in fans who aren’t as well versed in galactic history.
“His adopted home will become the base of our whole first season, and we watch that place become radicalized,” Gilroy says. “Then we see another planet that’s completely taken apart in a colonial kind of way. The Empire is expanding rapidly. They’re wiping out anybody who’s in their way.”
These are strategic moves for the dark side, asserting dominance over worlds that are manufacturing centers, that supply raw materials, or that provide other vital supplies needed to maintain control. “They’re taking over the corporate planets,” Gilroy says. “They’re tightening up their supply chains.” What the Empire doesn’t destroy, it consumes. “It’s all the ways that oppression can pull a culture apart and destroy it,” Gilroy says.
Gilroy highlights just a few such blank spots. “You know he’s been fighting since he was a child, right? He says that. You know he’s been a guerrilla fighter. You certainly know he’s been an assassin. He kills an ally in the very first scene,” Gilroy says, referring to a moment in Rogue One when Cassian murders an informant to prevent him from falling into the Empire’s hands. “That was a big gulp on Rogue One, to see who would swallow that. He’s morally complicated in a really dark way.”
Gilroy brings up another moment from the film in which Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso fears the Rebel leadership won’t back her and Cassian’s efforts to stage a heist for the Death Star plans. “Felicity comes out of the council meeting in Yavin and says, ‘They don’t want to do it. They don’t have the guts to do it.’ And he’s standing there with this murderers’ row of guys, and he says, ‘Man, if we don’t go do this, then all these terrible things that we did, all the crap that we’ve done, it’ll be useless. And all the moral, all the blood on our hands will be useless.’”
Read more from Gilroy and Casein Andor actor Diego Luna at the link below.
