“Andor” season one has come to a wrap with episode 12, “Rix Road,” an incredibly moving, incredibly rousing, symphonic crescendo where Maarva Andor (Fiona Shaw) makes a defining call to action to Ferrix and to the galaxy: to stop sleeping, to wake up, and to fight. Arguably the best episode of the series, it’s up there with the best episodes of TV we saw all year, full stop.
We spoke to creator, showrunner, executive producer, and writer Tony Gilroy once more; he joined us on our The Rogues Ones podcast once again to talk about the finale, season one, and a little bit of what to expect in season two.
There were two things that people either asked me or said to me over and over again about “Andor,” and I had to put those questions in front of him. One was, which I jokingly put to him, that he’s ruined “Star Wars” for all the people in love “Andor” so much and appreciate how serious, deep meaningful it is. It’s going to be very difficult to return to the cutesy Baby Yodas of it all, I posited with a laugh.
Gilroy had a more positive outlook on it, though, and basically said he hoped ‘Andor’ was proof of concept that doing ‘Star Wars’ differently can work, and he hopes it inspired all kinds of new takes that are not based on his.
“Well, we were talking the other day about all of the lanes that could be opened [by ‘Andor’],” Gilroy said. “I hope I’m opening a lane to a three-camera ‘Star Wars’ sitcom. I hope people have enough imagination to take the big lesson, which isn’t, ‘you’ve got to do it this way, this hard, or this real. The big lesson is: just don’t do the same fucking thing again. That’s all.”
Hard to argue with that point of view. The second thing everyone kept echoing to me, from fans, is, “he has to do more; he has to at least consult on ‘Star Wars’ going forward.”
That one, I was personally a lot more skeptical about, not because Gilroy hasn’t enjoyed his time on “Star Wars,” but because he already spent at least ten months on “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” and when is said and done and “Andor” is over, he’ll have spent five years of his life on this series, and knowing his taste, he’d probably want to move on and try other things (and potentially use the cache earned from this series to potentially revive some of the projects he was working on before “Andor,” including one that was a costly, very ambitious project that was set up at Warner Bros. with a lot of A-list stars almost on board).
Regardless, I had to ask. Would he at least consider consulting on ‘Star Wars’? The answer didn’t really surprise me.
“What do they say in the prison? What did they chant on the way out? One way out!” he said with a smirk. “We had t-shirts made up that said ‘One Way Out!’ My markers will be in late February or March. I will have finally finished all the rewrites on all the scripts; everything will be deadlocked; I’ll be writing every day until March, tightening, doing all the stuff that we do; I won’t have to come up with another season, which was just this enormous pressure before so it never ended, so my fantasy is in March I’ll be able to step back at least and have something of a more normal existence and do the next year of post and all the rest of the stuff.”
“And after that, I couldn’t possibly tell you what I would do,” he continued. “Boy, that would be the dumbest answer I could make; I have no clue.”
So maybe at best? Either way, the man is running a very long, very intense marathon and can’t possibly see that far over the horizon at the moment.
“Andor” is streaming now in its entirety on Disney+. We’ll be rolling out this full interview later today.
