Tony Gilroy Looks Back on Taking Shit Seriously in Andor

Tony Gilroy is a man with a vision. That vision guided him from the extensive reshoots of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story all the way to a Disney+ series about one of that film’s heroes, Cassian Andor—and finding in it a critical acclaim unlike anything the galaxy far, far away had seen in a generation.

He’s also a very frank man who knows when that vision can potentially turn on a dime—as it did one day while filming the series in Scotland, when the writer, director, and showrunner realized that his grand plan for Andor wasn’t going to work.

“We were filming, we were about halfway, three quarters of the way through filming season one, while I was really trying to come up with what was going to be the second season when we realized that we couldn’t do five years,” Gilroy recently reflected over Zoom. “So that became a very rapid exploration—you have basically a year to work on the show. It was more about being able to make the show, and pay for the show, and get the budget for the show, because between the time that season one started, and season two happened, the metrics and mandates of streaming had completely reversed.”

What hasn’t reversed in that time was Andor‘s favor. Upon release, audiences and critics picked up on what Andor was doing, leading to rave reviews. At a time where the franchise at large was still trying to navigate a post-Rise of Skywalker world, the series’ grounded exploration of the nascent rebellion against the Empire, and its more explicit examination of the ideologies at play within the galaxy far, far away, drew eyes beyond the usual Star Wars audience. “It was actually the critical success of the release of the show, and the response—and the passion of the response, even though it wasn’t an overwhelming, we didn’t crush the audience at first—but that passion really helped Disney get to the point to start funding the second season,” Gilroy continued. “Which we were just about to start shooting, because the alternative was to just not do it.”

After a few years waiting—impacted in part by a delay in production for the 2023 Hollywood strikes—we’re now little more than a month from the launch of Andor‘s second (and now final) season, and Lucasfilm is keen to remind people of what they might have missed out on. Today, alongside the launch of a 14-minute recap video, the studio and Disney announced that the first three episodes of the show would launch for free on YouTube, and the entirety of season one would be made available to stream on Hulu until the launch of season two. The series is preparing to headline next month’s Star Wars Celebration convention in Japan, a make-or-break moment for fans to learn more about a future of the franchise that has been in flux more than usual as of late.

But it’s also arriving in a form that Gilroy initially scrambled to adapt to. “I would start with existence, for that’s the first one. It’s the only way it could possibly exist,” Gilroy bluntly joked when asked what the series gained in its transition from a five-season plan down to just two. “The hubris and naivete and stupidity with which I entered this process, we all kind of did. How are we going to do these five years? It was just impossible, absolutely impossible.”

For Gilroy however, the consolidation was ultimately a galvanizing one. “Once we got hit in the head with that, I actually think, and it sounds a little cheesy, but it’s the truth: if I was going to design this in a perfect world, I would spend one year on [Cassian’s] education and the transformation into a revolutionary. I think that one season really fits that way, and I would stick with what we did on the way out, because it just, energy-wise, it just, I don’t really have anything else to say about it. You’ll see how much we have to say about it. The narrative, I don’t want to say fun, but the narrative opportunity of telling a story where you drop in a year later, you leave all the negative space and you just hit like a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then you drop a year and come back for another three days, is so exciting.”

“It seemed like in the beginning we were like, ‘I don’t know, is this a cocktail napkin bar conversation that is going to turn out to be a bust?’,” Gilroy pondered. “In the end, it turns out to be just this really thrilling, again, saying it’s a challenge makes it seem more like a game, but it was just a gas to do it this way. I wouldn’t do it any differently.”

Ahead of reaching that endgame though, the opportunity to revisit season one with Gilroy with the hindsight of what we’ve seen to come in season two is an interesting prospect. Although the show begins 15 years into the reign of the Empire, Andor doesn’t begin with a version of it that we are immediately familiar with. Out on the fringes where the show is most keen to explore its seeds of resistance, the face of the Empire is through the shell of corporate security. “It was just a really cool canonical opportunity to show what was a part of Star Wars history, which is the nationalization of corporations—which also a really traditionally fascist playbook,” Gilroy reflected on opening the series on Morlana One, and Cassian’s first brush with authoritarianism coming not from Stormtroopers, but the world’s corporate police force. “It was a great opportunity to get a different look and get a different thing.”

It’s in this environment, and the inciting incident that pushes Cassian on a path to the larger array of disparate anti-Imperial cells across the galaxy, that introduces us to one of Andor‘s most important characters: Syril Karn. Karn came to Gilroy, however, in the moment of creation, rather than necessarily as that major representative tool to show how galactic authoritarian transitioned from the likes of Morlana’s corporate-operated state to the fascism the Empire wields brazenly by the season’s ending. “I never thought in a big sense ever [when I’m writing],” Gilroy rebutted when asked about Syril’s arc. “I never think about anything thematically, or where I want a character to go. I was like, ‘Oh, okay, let me sketch a suit. There must be someone investigating [Cassian killing two corporate cops].’ Here’s this guy, and he’s investigating. Oh my god, he could be like Javert. He could be like, an obsessive dude. Let me start with that.”

“One of the pivotal scenes for me writing [Syril] was the scene with him and his mom Eedy, greeting him at the door and slapping his face. You write that, and you’re like ‘well, where am I going with this?’ I’m finding the characters all the way through, much in the same way the audience is finding them. I’m getting them on their feet, and I’m going teaspoon by teaspoon by teaspoon,” Gilroy continued. “Now, at a certain point, you’re stepping back and going ‘wait a minute, what side is he on, what’s this going to be?’ That’s how I do it. It would shock people how things start there.”

For Gilroy, however, that was part of what would ultimately make the character who he is. “My take on Syril is a little bit different than some people,” Gilroy ruminated. “I think he’s completely unformed, and I think he could’ve, would have just as eagerly embraced any kind of family that had taken him in, in a way. I think he was eager for acceptance, but passionately in need of that acceptance.”

But Gilroy’s ability to completely turn conviction in the opposite direction comes to the forefront when discussing Syril’s ideological antithesis in season one: Karis Nemik, a young member of the cell Cassian is parachuted into by Luthen to conduct a raid on an Imperial payroll facility in season one’s second arc. “This will violate everything that I just said in the previous answer,” Gilroy laughed. “I know I need to take a guy who’s going to be like a total cockroach at the beginning and turn him into a butterfly. I know that part of the way, I have to get him after 12 hours, to the point where he’s going to say ‘Take me to the revolution or kill me.’ I want to make that trip as exciting and adventurous and dramatic, and as wild as I possibly can, but I also have to make it plausible on an emotional level for him.”

Enter Nemik, the manifesto-writing insurgent. “I want to have as many different exposures to the power of rebellion as I possibly can—I do that through Maarva, I do that through the people [Cassian] meets along the way who’ve joined the Aldhani band. Everyone has their own story about how they’re there… and I went ‘I should really have a Trotsky. I should really have a young Russian,’” Gilroy continued. “I should have a dialectic character who introduces another note to the chorus of his education. That culminates in the prison arc, where he finally has his own little microcosm and his own little revolution. The prison is the final radicalizing experience for him, but I’ve given him what, eight, 10, 12 different really big bangs on the head along the way to say ‘Hey, this is where you should be going.’”

Where Cassian ultimately is going by the end of the first season is back home to Ferrix. Season one culminates in a heady chessboard of pieces converging on the funeral of Maarva Andor, who died of illness during Cassian’s incarceration. For Gilroy, beyond navigating the chaos that was going to explode from that metaphorical powder keg, the setting was also one that he viewed as deeply important to Cassian’s character at the climax of the season. “Narratively, I know I have to do that—I have to bring everybody back in one place again. That’s the hardest thing in spy movies. I’ve done so many, writing a Bourne movie… one of the hardest things about it is to try to get people to have conversations with each other and get into the same space,” Gilroy said.

“So let’s have everybody come back for this funeral. That’s my job, we have to puppeteer this whole thing so that everybody will get there—the only person I couldn’t get there was Mon Mothma. But the spooky, groovy, ‘look what I found’ side of is, I have in Ferrix what you’re always looking for,” Gilroy continued. “I have an environment, I have a place, I have a whole city that is absolutely mirroring what’s happening to my character all the way through the show. And I have the opportunity to, as Ferrix vomits up the rebellion, he becomes part of the rebellion. That’s the found object that, if you’re writing really well, presents itself. The other thing is mechanical—I gotta get everybody there. And there’s some fancy screenwriting to get everybody there! It’s the things that people don’t notice, things that are tricky. The other part is the residue of luck, and when things are really good, it’s like ‘Oh my god, Ferrix is Cassian. Cassian is Ferrix.’ And that’s a very satisfying feeling when all that can come together at the end of 12 hours.”

And so with that realization we and Cassian alike march into season two. Gilroy has his revolutionary taught, and the time is to put that education into real practice—but Andor season two will open in a very different world next month to the one that saw Cassian running through the rain on an unknown world, brushing up against thuggish corporate cops. Organized rebellion has begun to emerge across the galaxy, and with it, a world of familiarity. Season two, as it counts down the years to Rogue One, will bring in familiar faces like Alan Tudyk’s rogue security droid K-2SO, or Ben Mendelsohn’s Director Kennic. The black-helmeted Imperial military will be supplanted more and more by the familiar white armor of Stormtroopers. Perhaps most apprehensively for a sect of Star Wars fans who admired Andor for its capacity to be a Star Wars story that largely eschewed connections to the other chapters of its saga, it will brush up on events discussed and portrayed in other Star Wars material from this timeline.

“It wants to feel inevitable. One of the responsibilities is to deliver, canonically,” Gilroy said of season two playing in a more familiar sandbox compared to season one. “I have a couple events I have to deal with—the Ghorman Massacre, which is a canonically mentioned event, has some confusion about it that we’re straightening out. There’s not one single thing that’s written about it, nobody knows what it is, so we’ll define all that. I have Mon Mothma leaving the Senate, her big moment to leave, that’s on my calendar. K-2SO has to arrive, and we have to deliver enough espionage, and enough intrigue, and enough information about this mysterious energy project that leads to the exploration that’s going to happen in Rogue One. So we actually have a mystery there at the end that has to be really solved. And again, not unlike trying to tie what I was trying to do at the end of season one with Ferrix, but as the puppeteer, I’m trying to get everybody I can involved as much as possible in all that.”

But don’t mistake any of that for a checklist. For as understanding as he is that the notes he has to play as part of that larger chorus, to borrow a turn of phrase from Gilroy, he also remains frank about where Andor‘s focus lies. “More than that, we don’t care about,” Gilroy added. “We would never add anybody for fun. We’re not going to add anybody for a smile or a wink or anything like that. There’s nothing in there that’s some juicy tidbit just for the hell of it. Everything has to be organic.”

“That’s been our attitude all the way through: not to be cynical, and to take it more seriously than anybody ever took it. Even while we’re changing—some people feel as though it’s changing a lot—but even while we’re changing the grammar of what you can do, we’re trying very rigorously to be more serious about this shit than anybody ever has been.”

Andor will return to Disney+ for its second season from April 22. Episodes 1-3 of the first season are now available to watch for free on YouTube, with season one now streaming in its entirety on both Disney+ and Hulu.

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