Tony Gilroy sounds pretty depressed by how much Andor "rhymes" with reality

Andor creator Tony Gilroy says the arrest of a Ghorman senator rhymed with a recent ICE press conference.

By Matt Schimkowitz | August 19, 2025 | 7:15pm

Courtesy of Tony Gilroy

TV News Tony Gilroy

George Lucas built his Star Wars movies on complementary patterns. “It’s like poetry, they rhyme,” Lucas famously said during the making of The Phantom Menace. “You see the echo of where it’s all gonna go.” That has proven true throughout the Star Wars canon and beyond. Lucas’ prequel trilogy revealed itself as an astute warning for how fascism overtakes democracy. However, the connections between galactic autocracy and modern politics became more pronounced with Andor. Sadly, that doesn’t please creator Tony Gilroy.

In a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Gilroy reveals how “very sad for us how much it rhymes.” Gilroy says that, as a history lover who has been “consumed” by history his whole life, the show allowed him to put all that “accumulated[…]lumber down in the basement” to good use. But that was more fun in 2019. Back then, “the parallels between what was happening in the world and what was happening in the galaxy and the Empire — those were already obvious.” As he went on, it got worse. “Over the six years we’ve been doing the show, that little monster got on its feet and learned how to run,” he said. “When Senator Padilla was pulled out of the ICE meeting, like in the episode about the Ghorman senator being pulled out, there was a big text chain in our group, like, ‘Oh my God. It looked like the show.’ It’s very sad for us how much it rhymes.” So much for keeping politics out of Star Wars.