Sophia Michaels
It’s hard to brand any piece of entertainment that takes place in the Star Wars universe, backed with the full promotional and budgetary firepower of the Disney Galactic Empire, as an underdog. But when Andor debuted in September, starring Diego Luna as the title character (previously seen in 2016’s Rogue One), it seemed to get significantly less initial critical and social-media buzz than, say, The Mandalorian, or the Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones prequel shows that debuted around the same time.
Ten episodes in, however, that’s all changed, especially after Andor has shown itself to be exactly what showrunner Tony Gilroy promised: a grown-up, prestige-TV drama with searing action and Emmy-worthy performances that happens to take place in the same galaxy that spawned Grogu and Jar-Jar Binks. The narrative’s pieces started to come together around Episode Four, and its two climactic set-piece episodes — the heist in Episode Six (The Eye) and the stunning prison break in this week’s installment (One Way Out) — have been pretty much universally recognized as some of the best Star Wars storytelling in any medium.
With two episodes left, Gilroy spoke with Rolling Stone about the season so far, his plans for the second and final season (which begins production later this month), and a lot more.
Pretty much everything Star Wars up until now — maybe with the exception of Rogue One — has been in the genre of what they used to call “space opera” or “space fantasy.” It wasn’t really science fiction. Andor is much closer to something else. You could call it dystopian science fiction, you could call it allegorical science fiction.
I’m just naturally disruptive, in a positive way. Every time I look at a scene or a character or a line, everything about me wants to turn it upside down. I don’t wanna do what I did before. How can I make it different? What can we do? So my starting point is always that. I obviously didn’t come with a huge Star Wars resume. It wasn’t my wasn’t my go-to Friday night. I’m not beholden to a lot of other things. You don’t bring me in unless you know what I’m gonna do — and I gave them a good idea of what I was gonna do. So the mandate was to do something completely different. And from my point of view, I look at it and go, my God, this is about the making of a revolution.
This is about the history of a revolution. This is a five-year period that leads to this titanic thing. My God, what an incredibly fascinating tapestry to pull together, if you could find a way into this that they would let you make.
I didn’t really think of a genre. I knew [why] they were hiring me: “Oh, it’s a spy thing. A guy who did Bourne movies. He’s gonna be a spy guy.” People know that I can write action, so they knew that there would be action and things like that. We’ll take care of all that stuff and we’ll do it in an original, cool way, but they don’t really know what they’re asking for, and I don’t really know what I’m trying to get in the beginning that much.
So no, I didn’t have a name for the genre other than, “Wow. Like the first season is like 700 pages [of script]. What is that?” I never have grand plans. I always start small and build out. And I don’t know! Where are we now? What is our genre now? I don’t know how it would be described.
One of the things the show is doing that transcends Star Wars is depicting what creeping fascism is like on a human level, on a ground level, and what a real empire and real colonialism feels like. How conscious were you of that as a prevalent theme in the show?
Yeah, yeah. I’ve been an amateur historian my whole life. You could go back 6,000 years through all of recorded history. You go back to Sumerians, you go back to the Etruscans versus the Romans, you can find it anywhere you want. Oppression, authority, the misuse of human beings — these are universal. This is an opportunity to come in on something like this where you don’t have to be pinned down, contemporaneously. I’m finding out what every science fiction writer and what every writer of Westerns has always known: What a great place to put down something that all kinds of people can pull out and pick the ox that they wanna gore with your material. But in essence, you’re doing something truthful.
So yeah, this is about oppression. This is about colonialism. This is the abuse of power. This is about revolution. It’s been happening from the time that people first started gathering together in a town square.
The show really caught on fire starting in Episodes Four and Five. As you know, I enjoyed the first three as well, but Rolling Stone’s TV critic, Alan Sepinwall, spoke for some viewers when he wrote that from his perspective, you were insufficiently attuned to making each episode stand on its own, even within the larger story you were telling. I guess part of it is that for him, it started slowly. I’m just curious about what you think of that line of criticism.
Oh, I don’t even think it’s an argument! He’s gonna have to get with the program. [Laughs]
That’s some old shit, man. Everything, all of this shit is new, which is just really fascinating, to be at the frontier of this new kind of storytelling, this new kind of scale. I heard that [comment] along the way, even when we brought the episodes in [to Lucasfilm and Disney].
I don’t wanna piss this guy off, obviously, but I wonder if he feels the same way now, because do you really think that you will be able to appreciate what happened in Episodes Eight, Nine, and 10 as much without knowing what happened back in Episodes One, Two, and Three?
You’re absolutely enriched by it. It’s like, you go watch a car commercial, and they pull out a flag and a puppy and a truck, and you go, “Oh wow.” The music’s right, and you really feel something for a moment, but you walk away and you never think about it again. It’s this empty-calorie thing. If you really wanna feel something, if you really wanna have something that lives with you, the requirement for that is that you really care. [You need] that investment that you made in the early episodes. I don’t think I was, like, poking around. It’s pretty exciting! I think it’s a ripping yarn. It’s an adventure story all the way through. But knowing Cassian is that kid who beat the shit out of that console [in a flashback as a child] after they killed his friend, and knowing that rage is in him, is really important.
The idea that you have to wrap up every episode in a bow, and the old traditional thing was, “Oh, your first episode has to be your seventh episode” — I’ve heard all this shit my whole life. But as I said, I’m a disruptor, I’m going this way. There’s times where you really wanna package things. There’s times where there are episodes that have better breaks and better drops than others. But I’m happy with all the ones that we have. I’m not unhappy at all with the time we’ve spent with all of our characters.
All the writers on the show, we’re all older, beaten screenwriters, So we’ve been raised without a lot of real estate. Dan Gilroy and Beau Willmon. Beau on House of Cards could stretch out, but Danny and I in particular, we’d been beaten up with 130 pages our whole life. We know how to be tight in breaking the story. Again, I am not trying to piss this guy off. But I can’t tell you how much stuff is new. Like we’re having this conversation — we’re having a second conversation about the show — and we’re not even done yet. This is a frontier we’re on, right? It hasn’t really codified.
Someone had a very funny tweet that they love Andor, and they also love trying to picture what the toys would be from it. I want the prison set, personally.
[Laughs] We have toys. We have the Fondor Haulcraft [used by Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen Rael] and we have B2EMO. We’ll have some toys before we’re done.
You had to figure out what made Cassian turn into a committed member of the rebellion. And to a certain extent, it was fairly logical that he would end up unfairly imprisoned and that would be part of his saga. Tell me about breaking that part of the story, putting him in jail.
Yeah, you’re right. We don’t try to write mechanically and I’m always resistant to that. I don’t like to say, “Oh, here’s an idea. Let’s write to it.” I always like to have the adventure and the characters go where they end up going. But at the same time, you have your objectives. It’s a big Venn diagram that you’re working on. And if we’re gonna take somebody from being a completely disillusioned roach, who doesn’t care about anything but themselves, and you’re gonna try to make them into the person who’s gonna sacrifice themselves for the galaxy, it’s a pretty long journey.
What are all the things that have to happen in the course of a year? So we put the prison on the table in the [writers’] room. The prison hadn’t been figured out. We did a five-day writers’ room when we started in with Beau and Danny and I. We said, all right, we’ve seen a billion prison movies and there are a lot of great ones. The one thing we can’t do is what anybody did before.
So what can we do? Because if we can’t figure out something that nobody’s ever done before, we’re gonna do something else. We’re not just gonna do the same old shit in a prison. I don’t remember who came up with electric floors, but the moment electric floors came out into the conversation, we went, “Oh my God.” All of a sudden, we’re building it in the writer’s room. We had Luke Collins, our production designer in the writer’s room for five days.
But now there’s this mad whole day of constructing the prison and it was slightly different at that point. We didn’t figure out a lot. We spent 10 months building that prison and redesigning it and rewriting it into all the rest of it. No one is thinking thematically about what that means at that point.
You get to the end and you put it all together and you look at it and you go, Oh my God, this is another world. He’s in the world of Ferrix, which we’re gonna watch get radicalized. He’s in the world of Aldhani. We watch that world get turned upside down. This is a revolution.
This is a mini-revolution in its own right. And how great is it? I said, he can’t be a leader in the prison revolt. He has to learn the trick of leadership, which is that one of the great things about leadership: You don’t have to stand up in front, but to get someone else to stand up in front. When he gets Kino [Andy Serkis] to make the speech [in Episode 10], it’s a very important moment for me. That’s real leadership.
Getting Kino to make that speech and finding him as the mouthpiece — that’s the beginning of Spartacus. Our initial impulse was, how do we do it differently? Then there was all the mechanics, and then you get to the end and it’s like, Wow, this fits inevitably with what we’re supposed to be doing.
The previous set piece was the heist. And one thing that this show does that’s never been even discussed before in the Star Wars saga is focus on funding the Rebellion. It drives multiple plot points of the show. It’s such an obvious driver of the story, except no one’s ever done it before, so it can’t be that obvious. How did you get there?
This goes directly back to what I said before. Literally, I’m the classic old white guy who just can’t get enough history. The last 15 years, I’ve been reading all non-fiction. There’s an amazing book called Young Stalin [by Simon Sebag Montefiore].
The opening chapter is this incredible [potential] movie sequence where Stalin is part of staging a major bank robbery in a Georgian town in 1907. It involves 15 people and hookers and teamsters and all these things. Stalin was Lenin’s financier. He was a thief. And the reason Lenin loved him so much was he kept bringing the money. They needed money. This shit all costs money. People gotta eat, they gotta get guns. You gotta get stuff.
It’s knowing that and wanting to say something about that. Almost no one ever pays attention to that part of it. It’s an underutilized area of storytelling. I’m always obsessed with what my characters make and where they’re getting their money.
If you look at a picture of Young Stalin, isn’t he glamorous? He looks like Diego! We’re not doing [the] Stalin show. But, it’s fascinating. All through every revolution, it’s the same thing. It takes coin. Look at Exodus, where they’re trying to get money for Palestine.
My underdog favorite character on this show is Mon Mothma’s obnoxious husband, Perrin Fertha [Alastair Mackenzie]. How did you come up with him?
I’m gonna be very controversial here and say, Perrin is one of my favorite characters. I love what Alastair McKenzie’s doing with it.
I shouldn’t give anything away really, but he’s an epicurion in the world of people that are interested in fighting and arguing, and he’s like, “Man, why don’t we just party?”
There is a legitimacy to his argument. His marriage isn’t perfect from his point of view either. They were married at 15. He lives in that same box. He doesn’t have everything that he wants. It’s real, I hope.
How did you decide to make Mon Mothma [Genevieve O’Reilly] rich?
Chandrila [her home planet] is super upscale. Oh my God. I’ll get crushed, but I can’t remember what the provenance we were given was or what the legacy material is that we built on. [Ed. note: The planet appeared on the animated show Rebels and in some novels]. But Genevieve is so gentile, and it just naturally seemed to flow from that. You learn that she’s living this secret that you never knew about.
And with Dedra Meero [Denise Gough], was the idea was to make you root for her a little bit at the beginning – and then reveal that maybe you shouldn’t be rooting for the fascist girlboss who ends up torturing people?
No, we actually…we had the parallel experience ourselves. I brought her in we weren’t quite sure where she was gonna go along the way, but like, God, you’re rooting for her, there’s only two women in that whole place and like most women, she’s doing a better job than everybody else around her and she’s not getting any credit.
She’s right, nobody’s listening to her and you’re like, “Oh my God, man, she’s the underdog.” We were just so behind her. Then we got to Ferrix and we’re in the [torture] room, we’re like, Oh my God, what have we built? What are we doing? And that’s when you know it’s going really well. We wrote her like we loved her, but here we are now and there she is. So the experience of building her was parallel to the audience’s experience of watching.
I can feel, watching Beau’s episodes, his enjoyment of writing this show. What surprised you about his episodes?
Our process — I didn’t really know how to do this. Our biggest collaborations, really, were in those first few months of breaking out the story.
Breaking the plot is really the hardest thing to do here. The scene work is like sewing button stitches, and the dialogue is like tailoring all the way through. That’s something that is a whole separate process. But the building out of the show with Danny and Beau in those five days and then the months after — that’s where the money is, man.
I worked for Beau on House of Cards, so I had a really good relationship with him about being able to say, That’s bad, or that’s great, or that’s wrong. My brother Danny and I, we’ve been trading stuff for forever. So all three people at that table had a really vivid sense of what it means to collaborate and how unprecious every idea is. I’ll tell you one thing, man. When Beau called me up that one night and said, “Dude, [Mon Mothma] is gonna [be asked to] offer up her daughter in marriage [in exchange for financial maneuvering that will allow her to fund the Rebellion]. I’m like, Oh my God. He goes, Can we do that? I go, “I don’t care what they say. We have to do that.” That’s the kind of shit that’s really exciting.
And Beau had never written any action sequences before really either. Danny and I had done a lot of that. But it’s just been a whole bunch of obsessed people just going at it.
I know that early on you had the idea for Luthen Rael,Stellan’s character, as this kind of key power broker and puppeteer. It seemed like that was pretty core to your idea, and we keep seeing just how ruthless he is. And in Episode 10, he has that almost Shakespearean speech about what he’s sacrificed along the way. But he’s willing to allow terrible things to happen for the rebellion, and that clearly is key to the whole ethos of this show.
Drama is watching people you care about in difficult circumstances make decisions that you’re interested in. He’s pressuring a lot of other people into some part of his spectrum, and that speech is very much about him keeping a very important piece of his team in place. But he’s not bullshitting in that speech. Everything that he says is honest. Look, the ultimate revolutionaries, the ultimate warriors of anything, the ultimate religious zealots are people that believe that they will not live to see the thing that they are sacrificing themselves for. They’re not gonna get to see it. He’s at the far end of the spectrum. But he’s not being cynical in that speech. I think that’s a legitimately felt speech.
What percentage of the exact show that you wanted to make are we seeing on screen? And to what extent were things possibly pushed back on?
In what sense?
By Disney and Lucasfilm.
We can’t swear. There’s a limit to what we can do with sex, and there’s a limit to what we can do with violence. But as far as specific story elements or anything like that, nothing was blocked or prevented. No, never. They have been the best partner. They’ve been the most [willing to] gamble. Our dealings with them have been really immaculate. Money is money and things are not cheap, and it’s tough to work around that. There’s things we wanted to do where budget-wise, we couldn’t do them, or we had to tailor them back. Then with Covid — we had some things that became problematic for that. So there’s been a lot of rewriting, a lot of anxiety about stuff like that. But no, none of the things that you’re speaking about. No one’s ever pushed back on the story.
When we last spoke, you explained how Andor was going to be five seasons instead of two, until you realized how long that would take to make. After getting this far into Season One, I must admit I’m going to miss the three extra seasons that could’ve been. Is there any part of you that feels the same?
It just would have been physically impossible. We’re about to start shooting the second half in a month. So we’ve been prepping for the whole last year. There’s two directors in Pinewood [Studios, in the U.K.] that are prepping right now, and I’m getting ready to go over there and trying to get all our scripts together.
And I’m hoping what we’re gonna do in the second half will make the meal feel really satisfying. Because the first year is really about him becoming, and the last line of this tranche of 12 episodes will sum up where we’ve been trying to get to. And we come back a year later. It’ll be very different. The next four years [of story are not about becoming a revolutionary. They’re about learning to be a leader and how difficult it is to put the alliance together and what happens to people who are the original gangsters versus the establishment and a lot of different other issues.
One of the things that’s been so unique about this season is exactly what you were talking – character building and world building with a measured pace. How do you keep that kind of granularity when you’re gonna speed up the pace in the second season, where each year of story will get three episodes instead of twelve?
I’m carrying forward something like 30 characters. So what becomes interesting is now we can play the negative space. When you jump a year, what happened in between? You know the people, you know what their trajectory was. It’s energizing. We will be starting new characters, obviously, in the next 700 pages. There will be all kinds of new things and will be just as granular as we ever were. And really, the second half is about, what does time do to these people? People grow up and people get tired and people betray each other and people change their minds and people get weak and people get crazy.
Have you talked about doing more Star Wars when this is done?
I don’t talk about doing anything. [laughs] This is all I think about. This is all I do. I think about curling up in the fetal position when we’re done and getting a vodka IV for six months. [laughs]I don’t know, man. No, I’m not thinking about anything after this. I have no game plan after this. I just wanna make it right and get through it.
One of the directors said that you had a mandate, which isn’t surprising to anyone who’s been watching this show to keep the droids and aliens at the margins, in the background. Tell me about that.
I’ve heard that. I think We’ll be addressing some of that as we go along a little bit more. Sometimes it’s problematic in storytelling, where you can’t just introduce a character. You have to introduce, all their plumbing and all their health issues. People said, Why didn’t you have aliens in Narcina Five [where Andor is imprisoned]? You see the the five facilities that are in that lake there, so it’s easy for me to imagine that there’s another one that’s all aliens. But what are the mechanics of what you can do and build and hat would the bathroom be like on the factory floor? I don’t even really know. You get into a bunch of other issues that become just a little bit too complicated sometimes to go into. But we will be doing more of that as we go along.
And I understand that there’s some people that feel that’s been shaded slightly, but that’s probably the primary reason. It adds a level of complexity and it adds a level of political complexity, but we will be going there. Look, we’re going all the way to Rogue One. There’s a lot of that coming up.
Are we supposed to care or wonder about what the prisoners are being forced to build, or is that a red herring?
Somebody said, Oh, they’re building something and in the next room, they’re taking it apart. [laughs] In Clerks they talk about who’s cleaning up the Death Star, right? Like, who’s building all these ships? The amount of material that the Empire has is just epic. Where does it come from? Where does all that stuff come from? So we’re trying to say, Man, it’s a massive effort to build all these ships and build all these weapons, and build all these buildings.
And Scarif [an Imperial base planet from Rogue One], just building Scarif alone. Forget about it. All this stuff needs to be built and I don’t think everybody was getting $15 an hour to do it.
What do you want to say about the final two episodes that might pique people’s interest?
What should I say? I saw somebody say that we were spreading ourselves too thin with all these characters. But we be pulling people together. That is not something that we would let go by. And we won’t be leaving you with much of an enigmatic ending. Hopefully, they’re the most powerful two episodes that we have in the show.
It’s our emotional catharsis. It’s our physical catharsis. It’s our summing up for these 12 episodes. We’ve invested a lot in it, so we have high expectations that we’re paying it off.
