‘Andor’ showrunner reveals season 2 secrets and why writing Darth Vader is ‘limiting’

We already know an awful lot about the fates of many of the characters on Andor, but the show’s second season is nevertheless some of the most gripping television of the year so far. As the timeline barrels toward the beginning of Rogue One, leaping a year ahead every three episodes, both the stakes and the scale of the narrative are escalating rapidly. With the show’s first block of episodes now available, showrunner Tony Gilroy was ready to break down some burning questions and take a broader look at the season — including a reveal of two major characters who definitely won’t be appearing on the show. (Some spoilers for the first three episodes lie ahead — but for the record, Disney does not consider the information about the absent characters to be a spoiler.)

What was the process of breaking the stories for this season, especially given you were essentially making four mini seasons?
Consider the advantages that we had. First of all, we’d done a season, so we knew how to do it. We knew what we were into. I also canonically have to stick to certain items on the calendar. I have to do Mon Mothma‘s speech from the Senate on a certain date. Now, there was a lot of mess about the Ghorman massacre. There was a lot of confusion in canon about what it meant. It had never been resolved. And then beyond all that, we know where we’re going.

So, the breakthrough was going, “Oh, my God, we’re not gonna do five years [worth of seasons]. We’re gonna do another year where each block of three will represent a year.” And literally, I think I probably went back upstairs to my hotel room and started sketching that night or the next day. 

And the next revelation was, “Oh, my God, it would be so cool and elegant and smart if when we came back, we only came back for two or three days — if we came back in these really concentrated periods of time. And to really help people with the time thing, if we really came back and said, ‘Man, we’re just gonna drop the needle and drop and move away.’”

Then the final piece of that puzzle was, with the help of knowing where I have to go, I wrote the in and the out — the scenes at the top and the end of each block, as proof of concept that it could really work and we wouldn’t have to do a lot of naked exposition. Could we really elegantly let that negative space work in our favor? And then I wrote my three episodes at the top to get that sharp. And then we went into the room and then we divvied it up. 

Even more than the first season, there’s so much that feels topical. You have undocumented people working in farms. There are things later on that seem to tie very directly into things in the real world. How much were you thinking about current events and how much were you just letting it play out?
The sad truth is, I did not write this with a newspaper. We were sketching this out four or five years ago — it’d be impossible. I think you’d lose your mind trying to make a gigantic show [that tries] to catch up with current events. History has its own relevancy, and the repetition and the rinse and repeat of history is something that a lot of people don’t really seem to be aware of. If you go on Wikipedia and look up rebellions and revolutions, it’s one of the longest entries I’ve ever seen. It just goes on and on. And by the time they get to the 16th century, they just start listing them. And I’ve been reading about this stuff, the ones that interest me — whether it’s the Haitian Revolution or the Russian Revolution or Thomas Paine or Oliver Cromwell — I’ve been reading about all this stuff for my whole life because it interests me.

The idea that there’s something completely unique about what we’re going through is a bit naive. There’s that old curse, “May you live in interesting times.” And I think what’s cool about the show is it’s really about ordinary people, just regular people who are just going about their lives. And all of a sudden history is knocking on the door. What happens when the shit comes to your neighborhood? I’m trying to be timeless, really. So any similarity is a very unfortunate repetition of all the shit that’s happened in the past that I’m basing this on.

The scope of it all, and the tragedy, it’s a little bit like a Russian novel or something.
Yeah. I really think of it as a novel in two parts. I think of it as, like, you had the opportunity to take a shot at doing War and Peace. That’s the opportunity. When are you going to get this chance again?

That’s really why I don’t think I knew this when I started. Some part of me probably was feeling it, but I was so underwater and so overwhelmed for so long on the show, and so anxious about it until we really found [our] footing. And as we said before, Covid just saved the show and gave me a chance to take a deep breath and sit in this room and not direct, and really do what I’m supposed to be doing. The opportunity that was here for me to talk about things I would never have a chance to put in any other script must have been always in the back of my mind, because when I finally hit it and realized that was what was happening, I felt at home.

We get again and again a taste of Luthen’s absolute ruthlessness. It gets ramped up. You realize he really will do anything. He’s a truly complex character, and many things in this show resist tidy moral lessons. Cassian argues that the rebellion wouldn’t really exist without him. How do you see him?
Every revolution has people like that. What he’s told you flat out, he wasn’t bullshitting: “I’ve given everything, I’ve sacrificed everything.” The accelerationist political theory that he espouses is a classic in the repertoire of insurrection and revolution. Make things really bad and up the pressure — that’s a legitimate tool. I think that where he fails is, the human resources part of it is really bad [laughs]. He’s so warped by his commitment, and by what’s happened to him, by where he finds himself, and the desperation to see some sort of activity, that he shoots himself in the foot along the way and makes things worse. He clearly is not a friend to any romantic relationship. He’s careless with the people that he should be taking care of more. He manipulates them in ways that are complicated.

He’s a guy who built a startup in his garage. He built a revolution in his garage, and now he’s gonna go public and he’s got VC funding. And man, how do you scale up a revolution when paranoia and secrecy and all the things that got you there, that’s your basic code — how do you work with others?

All revolutions have these firebrand, deeply committed, terrifying people that get shit done that are not there at the goal line. They don’t make it to the end. They don’t get to see it. They become a liability. The original gangsters are not always rewarded with a halo until they write the history. Maybe.

Then you have Syril and Dedra, your Imperials in love — it’s a unique thing this season. Tell me about having these two bad guys and watching the relationship that way. 
I never think of them as bad guys, first of all. They’re so juicy. And the idea that two people can be so beholden to an end goal of the Empire, the support of the Empire, and yet have such completely different approaches… They seem so much alike, don’t they?

They both overstepped their boundaries in investigations, and they both appear to be completely beholden to the empire. But in truth, one of them is a romantic and fantasist. Syril is a romantic, really. His inner conversation must be very loud and very extreme.

Dedra, on the other hand, is a zealot. I think her imagination is like a Formula One driver. I think it’s just, keep on going and get it done. It’s so fascinating to me what happens between the two of them and how they interact, and I don’t have anybody else for them to be with.

They started to fall together in our mind in Season One. I think Denise Gough [who plays Dedra] was upset a little bit that we were gonna do that in the beginning, but I think she’s overjoyed now with what she gets to play. 

Mon Mothma’s hedonistic husband, Perrin, seemed a bit more rounded out this season. I felt some sympathy for his point of view this time.
Totally. It peeved me the way that people in chat rooms just hated him and talked about how horrible he was. And I thought, that’s not what I envisioned. And I told [actor Alastair Mackenzie, who plays Perrin] that we would do some things to complicate it. Perrin is clearly no saint, and he’s certainly no rebel. But he has a very legitimate point of view and one that I think the show benefits from having.

Why shouldn’t somebody represent hedonism? Why shouldn’t somebody represent pleasure? Why shouldn’t somebody represent living in the moment? What the fuck is wrong with everybody else who’s running around doing all this other stuff? So, getting to do the wedding speech for him, we really worked hard on that. We really wanted that to be special. I’m very happy that’s in there.

My guess is that in this moment in history, people will suddenly find themselves a lot more sympathetic to someone who just wants to live their life while all this crazy stuff is happening in the world.
Yeah, I know. They’ll be going the other way now. We’ll have Perrin suddenly being everyone’s favorite. I also wanted to explain their marriage… If you get married at 15, and it’s two beautiful people and they’re rich and complicated and sophisticated, they’ve been through all kinds of things. Marriage is not a monolith. And the scene where they have the breakfast where he calls out Tay Kolma to her that next morning — I just love the way that Ariel Kleiman directed that scene. I think it’s so beautifully directed. I’m just in awe of the blocking and everything. It was nice on the page, but the two actors and Ari — that scene is just so much about a complicated marriage of people that have had all kinds of trouble, but yet no one else knows their story the way that they do. And the affection that comes from that and the comradeship that comes from that is something that the show benefits from.

Syril’s mother again reveals herself as, in a galaxy full of terrifying creatures, one of the most terrifying. Her passive-aggressiveness is the most powerful force in the Star Wars universe.
[Laughs.] Yeah, man, she’s an alpha, an emotional alpha predator for sure.

She’s gotta be a fun character to write.
It really is. It took a long time to get it right. Danny [Gilroy] worked on it and got really close. And then we have to do all these mock scenes. Whenever we’re auditioning actors, we have to write all the scenes for 400 actors. We have to write the scenes because of secrecy. We can’t let the scripts go out. So we have to write a scene that approximates what the scene’s about.

And her stuff came alive in the mock scenes. And then as [Eedy actor] Kathryn Hunter came in, it took a lot of people dialing in to try to get the right voice for her. But now I can hear it. Now I can do it. She’s just so much fun to write. We wanna do a supercut of just her. That’s what we gotta do. Just the Eedy Show.

Let me ask about the first three episodes where Cassian’s on Yavin with these really amateur rebels who are embroiled in deadly infighting. What were you trying to show there? How did that end up being a big part of the first three episodes?
I wrote the opening. I had the whole opening with him talking to the woman [before stealing a Tie Fighter], which was really good for me to do, because it shows Cassian as a leader. It really fills in the last year — obviously, he’s been stealing things for Luthen and the revolution is evolving.

It’s a really powerful speech that he’s giving to her. There’s a little bit of Luthen — is he manipulating her a little bit? You don’t know. And so I had this really elegant-feeling speech. And then we knew that the visual effects department was really excited. I just gave them free hand and said, “OK, this is what I want to have happen in the hangar when he goes to steal this thing and it goes wrong.” And I knew they were working away and it was gonna be really cool and he’s gonna fly off. So the show starts very proper. And it’s very regal what he says to her.

And honest to God, I went to dinner, a big family dinner, and my son and my niece’s husband, who’s also an actor, were at my end of the table and everybody’s drunk and whatever, and they were like Heckle and Jeckle, and all night long, they were just going at it.

I went to work and I was like, I really wanna have some stupidity in here. [Laughs.] The rebellion has to have some idiots. I’ve started so elegantly and it’s gonna seem so prissy if I just leave it on that [level]. What would it be like? So I wrote the parts for them and they ended up playing the two parts. That’s my son and my niece’s husband, the two guys on opposite sides. And it comes from a drunken dinner. And they’re not dumb men! They can behave dumb. They’re very entertaining at dinner. So I wrote it for them.

You do a reveal that this has all been in Yavin, the future home of the Rebel base. What are we supposed to take away from that reveal?
It’s a rebel hideout that certain people know about the way pirates used to have a certain island or something like that. Cassian Andor is a bit like Zelig in a way. Not that he’s invisible or anonymous, but he’s in all these places where things happen. 

And no one had ever done the origin of Yavin. And the only thing they really know is there were these beasts there. That’s already in canon. The beasts are canon. I don’t know, it just felt like a cool thing to do. Why not?

I’m allowed to say at this point that Darth Vader doesn’t ever appear in this show. Was that ever something you thought about?
No, that was never on my agenda. Writing for Darth Vader is really limiting. I’ve done it. He doesn’t have a lot to say.

The Emperor never shows up either, but the way he’s spoken about makes me picture the more original Lucas conception of him: more like Richard Nixon, as Lucas once said, than the cackling villain we see in the movies. You have to picture him on the day-to-day management side.
He was too big a piece of meat for me to introduce. It was too heavy a lift. I thought about it at one point, but it was too heavy a lift.

But when we speak about the Emperor on the show, he’s more like a president or something. The offscreen character feels more like a politician rather than the full-on Sith.
One of the fascinating things that I realized when I started the show in the very beginning is how many billions of beings are in the galaxy. Nobody knows about the Jedi, nobody knows about the Sith. It’s just a tiny percentage of people that have any notion of it at all. It’s not in the culture. And I remember being really surprised as it was explained. I thought it was something that everyone knew about, but no, it’s very secretive and small.

You’re moving on from the Star Wars universe to do other things. Given that you’re not moving forward in this world, what kinds of things can be done in the Star Wars universe that haven’t been done?
I don’t know. You gotta be really careful. I was riffing [in one interview] about a three-camera show — there’s not a lot of irony sometimes in some of the chat rooms. It doesn’t help you to riff about Star Wars. I was goofing a little bit, but I was legit.

I think it was the very first conversation with [Lucasfilm president] Kathy Kennedy way back when she was like, “After Rogue One we could do anything. What do you want to do with this?” And I literally was like, “Could you do Inherit the Wind? Could you do a courtroom drama in Star Wars?” Why couldn’t you? It’d be fascinating. You’d have to invent the legal system, but you could. Why not? That would be interesting.

They are doing a horror movie, I think, now. I think that Jim Mangold and Beau Willimon are working on an origin story for the Force, like a 25,000-year-B.C. thing. And anything that works is gonna work. The stuff that’s gonna be lame is gonna be lame. But there’s no reason not to play with this. I know there are people that feel like, “Oh, my God, why can’t we just have the thing we had before and have it be great?” And I can’t answer that question. I don’t know. It’s hard to do? People are tired of it? I don’t know what the reason is, but there’s a lot of real estate there. There’s a lot of beings in the universe.

Look at Mandalorian, look how far away we are from Mandalorian. And yet they work. Mandalorian made our show possible. Skeleton Crew — holy shit, man. That’s like a whole different flavor. It feels right. Smells right. I don’t know. It is not my problem. But if it was, yeah, I think they want to think about it that way.

From Rolling Stone