The second and final season of Lucasfilm’s acclaimed and Emmy-nominated “Andor” series, a prequel drama to “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” is set to debut on April 22. In anticipation of this event, Disney has announced that “Andor,” previously exclusive to Disney+, will now be available on Hulu and YouTube. This decision aligns with the series’ dramatic and adult-oriented nature, as “Andor” is arguably way more TVMA than anything “Star Wars” has ever made on screen (read our season one review). Additionally, Disney has released a 14-minute season recap on YouTube, providing viewers with a concise refresher before the new season commences.
To commemorate this occasion, we had the opportunity to speak with Tony Gilroy, the Oscar-nominated creator, showrunner, writer, and producer of “Andor” (known for “Michael Clayton” and writing the ‘Bourne’ trilogy), about the first season and the upcoming developments in the second season.
What’s in store? Life during wartime: a drama about people trying to survive and make their way in the world while a brutal and oppressive dictatorship envelops the galaxy in darkness. Here’s my chat with Tony Gilroy.
Let’s start broadly for a second. The history of good prequels in cinema is pretty low. There are not many good ones, but you’ve done it twice with “Rogue One” and “Andor.” Damon Lindelof has that famous quote about prequels being hamstrung by an inevitability and outcome that we already know. What are your thoughts and your secret?
I don’t know how anybody can ask that question because it presumes that you don’t think you’re going to die. Like the suspension of disbelief is just baked into the animal we are. Why would you get up every morning and do anything? We’re all going to die. All these characters are going to die, right? There’s going to be a thermodynamic death of the universe. Ultimately, why are we doing anything? Why do we care? Well, we care because we do.
And so, it’s always seemed to me a false premise. To me, it’s how interesting the protein in there is, and you’re going to open that new shell, that prequel shell. What’s in there?
I’ve also had fun with it. I’ve had really big-time narrative fun messing with the limitations of what’s there, you know? And ‘The Bourne Legacy’ was just a gas. I said, ‘Can I have the other movie [‘The Bourne Ultimatum’] playing in the background? Can I do that? I’ve never done that. No one’s ever done that. I don’t think anybody’s done it since. And I didn’t get that much credit for it! But when we were doing it, I was like, ‘This is badass, man.’ I have another movie playing inside my movie.
Oh, trust me, I wrote about that. And I was like, this is so f*cking dope. Ha!
Yeah, so limitations fire up the imagination sometimes. So that’s my answer. We’re all going to die, sorry!
I’ve followed your career closely, and I would have never guessed that at one point, you’d spend more than half a decade working on “Star Wars.” It was six or seven years between ‘Rogue’ and ‘Andor’?
It’s been like ten. ‘Rogue’ was ten years ago. But you’re right; I wasn’t actively working on [‘Star Wars’] the whole time. There’s a gap in there. I have a ten-year watch. The ten-year retirement watch.
Can you take me back to that moment when Kathleen Kennedy called you and what that moment was like? Presumably, because you have great objective eyes, and you helped Gareth a little bit on “Godzilla,” right?
Yeah, man, but I don’t want to talk too much about ‘Rogue.’ It doesn’t do anybody any good. That story is known. Yeah, they had some trouble, and I came in, and incrementally, we got more involved as time went on. But I wasn’t there with the same—it wasn’t the same experience. I wasn’t committed to it the way I am now. That was very clinician, you know? It started off as very script-doctor mechanics. But I wouldn’t have come on this project like that; that would have been a horrible way to start a five- and six-year commitment. “Andor” has been a very different experience. But by the time I’m done, I’ll have had my hands on a lot of cannon.
I guess what I was getting at with the ‘Rogue One’ question is: you probably wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t fallen in love with these characters while working on it.
Oh yeah. Absolutely. You can’t if you’re [not in love]. But it’s the entry point, and it’s a lot easier to sleep at night when it’s not entirely your thing. You know what I mean? It’s a lot easier to stay loose.
Let’s talk about this season’s format, which is very different from last season, with three episodes per week capturing a time span of one year. So, it seems much more concentrated.
Yeah, that’s what they’re going to do. We’re going to release a movie a week, basically for a month, essentially. We feel like we’ve done eight movies in five years. That’s how we look at it.
You mean, each trio of episodes a week amounts to one movie. Season one was twelve episodes, with 3-episode arcs making another four movies.
Yeah, and so, this will be four more [movies] basically, and they’re going to release them that way. The last time we released [season one], it was a whole different business and streaming—the word was adhesion. We need adhesion! That’s how we even got to 12 episodes. Like, “What, you want us to make 12 episodes? Oh my God. Oh, adhesion!” Now it’s— I don’t know what the metrics and demands are now, but this is how they want to do it. And it’s cool with us.
I love the delivery system because I selfishly don’t have to wait 12 weeks for the whole story. But it also makes sense, given each of the three episodes covers one year.
And it’s really intense because when we come back each year, it’s not like we stick around. It’s like three days each time, like a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of a certain year. So don’t ever let your foot off the gas; the meter is running the whole way through.
I love the three-part story arcs in season one, too; you really convincingly tell the story and slow build of how this guy, Andor, got radicalized, essentially. So, looking back, what in your mind are the three or four key turning points in Andor’s evolution in season one? I feel like there must be a dynamic chart that chronicles his emotional growth.
Yeah, I mean, very much so. I’m sure I had a list somewhere in the beginning as I was working. It’s like the stations of the cross. Andor has got to go through each one of these experiences to get to his final destination. So what do you have? You have [the young character] Nemec, who was the theoretician; he’s the Trotsky who has the manifesto. So, you have the intellectual side of it. You have all the experiences of the other people he encounters along the way, all their stories, all the things that have happened to them becoming radicalized by that.
He comes back to Ferrix and tries to get his mother to leave with him. “I’ve got cash. Let’s go. Let’s go splurge!” And she shuts him down. Oh, my God, she’s becoming increasingly inspired by what he’s done that he can’t even tell her the full story. And then he goes off to a party and gets busted for what is basically shopping.
And now he gets in prison, and prison is really the ultimate radicalization for him. Then he’s in the throws of his own revolution and becomes a leader. Then, the final push is to come back to Ferrix and have the whole fermenting bucket of all those different things come together with Marva’s speech and its action.
So, it’s calculated but has to feel inevitable, real, and organic. But yes, he has to go through all these trials to get to be as cool as he is at the end of the show. It’s a quest movie. A revolutionary quest.
Concurrently, as you tell Andor’s story, you also tell the journey of many other characters. Still, I wonder if you see the most important three as Andor, Syril and Mon Mothma, and to a lesser extent, Luthen, but his isn’t an evolution; it’s more inevitable collision course. There’s the fanaticism of Syril, but Mothma is going from being a politician to someone forced to truly fight and get radical, too. She’s thinking, “I’ve gotta do more than just this.”
Yeah, I mean, that is how I start my day. Every day when I go to work, I’m not thinking about what they’re thinking about ideologically; I’m thinking about what’s working for them.
What’s fascinating to me about Syril is that it’s almost as easy to see him going another way. If he had been welcomed and embraced there, who knows? His need to belong is so epic, but he also has a strong sense of rules. And you know, if your world is terrifying and chaotic, if your mother has helped make the world chaotic for you in a way where you don’t have your feet on the ground, you’re constantly leaning into rules. Rules should work. And these are the rules, so let’s follow the rules. And why don’t people follow the rules? And then he has his life upended by this son of a bitch, and so now he’s out for revenge. So, he’s pushed to his side, isn’t he? He’s pushed into Dedra’s arms in a way.
And with Mon Mothma, again, it’s the same thing. I never really analyzed how she or Vel [Sartha] became revolutionaries. There’s certainly a lot of historical precedent for elites to become part of the revolution, whether it’s the Russian Revolution or the Christians in ancient Rome or wherever you want to pick— the Baader–Meinhof Group.
So, there’s how they got there, but for me, it’s always like, God, how hard will that be today in this scene and this next moment? What’s the pressure that’s going to put on this poor woman? So, I always come in small.
OK, so we have to talk season two a little bit. What can you tease about it? Are we going to see special guests like Andy Serkis in season one? Are we going to get more ‘Rogue One’ connections? Cause it feels ripe for connectivity that can feel organic and not fan service.
We will keep the same tasteful grammar that we had before. We’ll never add anybody just for the sake of saying, hey, look over here. We are ultimately leading to ‘Rogue One, and we must deliver the information to Yavin about the Death Star. And we have to explain how that information came there. So, we have some pretty significant storytelling responsibilities at the end of the season there. But we won’t ever add anybody that we don’t need or just for fun.
Right, you have [Ben Mendelsohn’s] Orson Krennic in there, but that seems pretty organic and necessary to the story of The Death Star that manifests in ‘Rogue.’
And then there’ll be other people and a lot of great guest stars. The show is as hugely populated, if not more so, than it was before. And, my God. I mean, there are another 400 speaking parts this season. It’s crazy, but never gratuitously and never— to me, “fan service” is a bad term. Our fan service is to be serious and not cynical and not f*ck with it and never mess around or wink at you or say, “Hey, look over here.” Our fan service is to be mean; we’re taking this shit seriously.
One thing I constantly hear from fans is Tony Gilroy should stay one. He should advise, consult, godfather, take over for Kathleen Kennedy, what have you. Fans want you to stay, but I try to tell them you’ve already dedicated a lot of time to this unexpected detour.
Yeah, I think we’re all going to drop the mic here after this one and try to do something else [laughs]. Yeah, it’s time to do something else. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again because it’s legitimate. It’s been a long career and a pretty good one.
But I don’t think I’ll ever have a chance to work on anything as important as this. This has been the most important thing I’ll ever get to do in terms of how much imagination went into it, how much work went into it, how much of a better writer I became doing it, how much I learned doing it, and how important the subject matter was and the scale of it. It’s hard to imagine that a situation like this would ever come around again.
For sure, and you’re already intimating it, but the story you’re telling of radicalization, revolution, rebellion and fighting for what you believe in, it’s very rare you get this kind of massive, popular vehicle to tell it. On Disney+, no less.
And it’s a story that’s been going on since the very beginning of recorded history, so like 6000 years. If you look at Wikipedia and pull up revolutions, it’s the longest Wikipedia entry you’ve ever seen. It just goes on and on and on and on. By the time they get to the 16th century, they should start listing them because there are just so many rebellions and revolutions and so much chaos.
And to your point, how many people have had a chance to write about it on this scale? And then how many people had a chance to write about it on this scale and get to dramatize it and make it real? It’s never happened before with the most popular IP in the world. I mean, what a trip!
For real. OK, so it’s essentially four more chapters to go, four more movies. Can you tease anything that Andor goes through emotionally, even in the abstract?
Andor has a lot of things to go through. Look, I’m carrying a lot of characters now all the way through. So the overarching, fundamental, consistent throughline is all these people just trying to live while they’re in the midst of a gigantic storming revolution. How do you fall in love in the middle of a revolution? How do you hang onto a relationship? There’s a lot of romance in this second half, and many different people in different relationships. How do they fare?
How does how do people like Luthen—who are the original gangsters and the guys who built the revolution in the garage—how do you go public? How do you take it wide? How do you roll out your company, and how do you roll it out when you can’t trust anybody and the wrong mistake is death? How does the Empire begin to realize the difficulty of making the energy Death Star project real? And the pressures on a corporate level, the pressure that it puts on all the employees down below, and those same issues spread out to every single person inside here. Who am I willing to die for? How did I end up in a life where, all of a sudden, I have to die for something?
Most people just go through life easily, but here it’s suddenly like, ‘Well, holy shit, man, you know what? This is what the deal is now. The deal is you’ve got to die for something.’ And characters are really saying, ‘Well, I just wanted to live!’
So yeah, that’s our protein. That’s our food all the way through. And then on top of that, you want to have a ripping adventure story. You want to blow people’s minds. You want to have good espionage. We want to be exciting all the time. So that’s the that’s the big stone soup that we’re brewing.
Oh man, I can’t wait.
“Andor” debuts on Disney+ on April 22.
