Denise Gough talks about how she built Dedra Meero, the newest Star Wars villain, for the Disney+ Andor series.
Shortly after receiving the scripts for Andor Season 2, Denise Gough – aka Star Wars’ most terrifying new antagonist, Dedra Meero – found herself face-to-face with the big boss. Not Tony Gilroy. Not Kathleen Kennedy. It was Emperor Palpatine himself. “As I was walking home, I bumped into Ian McDiarmid,” the Irish actor tells Empire on Zoom, after Andor’s explosive finale hit Disney+. “I said, ‘Hello, boss!’ I thought, if anyone took a picture of this, it’s so brilliant – Dedra having an undercover meeting with the Emperor in Notting Hill.” In the Skywalker Saga, Palpatine was the Empire’s fearsome figurehead, always looming in the shadows. But in Andor, Dedra is out in front – a dangerously driven Imperial officer with a desire for order stronger than the tractor beam of an Arrestor Cruiser. Star Wars has a new face of evil – and it’s the face of Dedra Meero.
That face is one of her primary weapons. Unlike Vader, Palpatine, and Kylo Ren, Dedra isn’t a Force-user. She has no lightsaber, nor the Darksaber. She has no cloak to swoosh, no grand evil designs; just an unwavering dedication to the Empire’s ideologies, and a stare more bone-chillingly cold than the vacuum of space. “My mother used to say to me, ‘You need to smile, because you can look quite sour if you don’t’,” Gough says. “I have a naturally downturned mouth.” Channelled through Dedra Meero, it’s a look that could power-down the Death Star.
In fact, Dedra’s face is so powerful, it does things even Gough’s cannot. Filming Episode 9’s gruelling interrogation – in which Dedra tortures Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), an ally of Diego Luna’s central hero, Cassian Andor, by flooding her mind with the screams of a dying civilisation, children included – it took on a life of its own. “When I watched it, I was like, ‘How did I get my face to twitch there?” Gough recalls. “I can’t do that now! If I tried to do that for you, it’s not possible.” That tic (“Twitchy-face Gough,” the actor dubs it) emerged organically – perhaps a result of Dedra’s body language being otherwise under complete control. “Ben Caron [director] set up my character,” credits Gough. “Initially, Dedra was fixing her belt, doing her thing, and he went, ‘It’s a bit swishy. Don’t do any swish. Try it with your hands behind your back.’ And that was it. Everything was really economical. She became still.” That stillness provides a presence so strong, Vader could feel it a parsec away.
When showrunner Tony Gilroy approached Gough for his revolutionary spy-thriller-in-space, it wasn’t to find out if she’d be right for it – that was already clear to him. (“I don’t quite know what that says about me,” she laughs.) Instead, he was trying to win her round to the idea, having been wowed by her lead performance in stage smash People, Places And Things as a drug-addicted actor – starting in the smallest room at the National Theatre, then moving to the West End, before transferring Off-Broadway in the States. Before bagging that role, Gough was on the verge of quitting acting; when she got it, she was so overwhelmed she “couldn’t stop crying.” Unbeknownst to her, it began a path towards Star Wars. “I never met Tony Gilroy when I did that play,” she says. “I was just doing the play, and then I did another play and some TV and film.” One abandoned Game Of Thrones spin-off prequel pilot later (“I had a great time, worked with amazing people, got paid – and then it wasn’t picked up, and I was like, ‘Oh, great! I don’t have to do the five-year contract!’”), the galaxy far, far away beckoned. “My agent said, ‘So… Star Warshave called.’ I thought, ‘That’s ridiculous,’” remembers Gough. There was one issue. Two, actually: she didn’t know who Tony Gilroy was, and she knew next-to-nothing about Star Wars.
“I think I saw them when I was a kid, because I have five brothers,” says Gough of her history – or lack of – with cinema’s greatest space-opera. “I remember a piece of a toy that might have been the Death Star. But maybe that was Star Trek.” An admission that she didn’t know her Wookiees from her Womp-rats was music to the showrunner’s ears. “He said, ‘That’s great, me neither.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, that’s interesting.’” Soon, Gilroy was giving Gough a rundown of what his series would be. Rather than keeping the show under a veil of secrecy, he sent her scripts for the first three episodes. “I’ll never forget it,” she says. “I was sitting at my kitchen table, and I thought, ‘This is magic.’ All the [scenes with the] kids… It was like reading a really great play.” That her character doesn’t even appear until Episode 4 didn’t matter, Gough was already in – an hour-long Dedra debrief with Gilroy sealed the deal. “I was like, ‘Okay, yeah. I want to do that. Definitely.”
While she undertook a Tony Gilroy deep-dive, Gough opted not to do the same for Star Wars. “I watched Rogue One,” she says. “But I didn’t [watch them all]. I thought, ‘I don’t want to have too much information. I don’t want to be doing a version of something, or stepping into a club. I just want to play this woman, and then see what happens.’” Instead, she took the initial bones of Dedra – pitched to her by Gilroy as both ‘fascist’ and ‘badass’ (“I remember that, because it’s such an American thing to say,” she laughs) – and set to work fleshing them out. And what she found terrified her.
Read the interview in full at Empire Online. Watch the first season of Andor exclusively on Disney+ now.
