Andor's Tony Gilroy is free to say the "fascism" part out loud now

Nine months after Andor ended, Gilroy acknowledges that Disney asked him to tone things down in interviews.

By William Hughes | February 20, 2026 | 7:08pm

Photo: Courtesy of Tony Gilroy

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Andor creator Tony Gilroy did a fairly extensive press tour when the show’s second and final season rolled out last year, in which a great many people—including your humble Newswire writer—asked him about the Star Wars show’s very obvious parallels to real-world events. Invariably, in these interviews, Gilroy would give an obviously true, but also obviously diplomatic, answer: That nothing he was writing about in his ground-level examination of the Galactic Empire as a fascist and authoritarian regime was new, and that the fact that the series kept rhyming with a rising tide of right-wing governments in countries around the world was a sad symptom of human nature, not a direct commentary on any given situations. Gilroy never specifically said that his employers at Disney had asked him not to use words like “fascism” or “genocide” in these conversations… until now, per a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, where Gilroy acknowledges that request, and calls that old approach “a very, very safe and legitimate place for us to sell the show without ever having to say what I’m free to say now.”

To be clear, the showrunner isn’t claiming to have been horrifically stifled by The Mouse Corporation, noting that he worked up the press strategy after he and Diego Luna did the very first interviews for the show’s new season, and realized that they were about to get hammered with questions about the show’s parallels to, say, the Trump regime. “We stepped back,” Gilroy says, “And we had a bunch of people that we were going to put on the road to sell the show. The actors have a broad spectrum of political ideas, and we didn’t want anybody to perjure themselves or violate their conscience. So we came up with a legit historical model, and it’s a version of what I’m telling you now. ‘We studied history to make the show, and we based it on historical models. We don’t have a crystal ball. There’s comps for everything that we did all through history.’” (And, again, as someone who had one of these conversations with Gilroy while also reviewing the series: It’s not like he wasn’t allowing the work to scream the answers he was politely sidestepping in interviews; he might not have been saying “genocide,” but Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma certainly was.)

Gilroy still holds to that line to some degree, noting, for instance, of the show’s depiction of Ghorman—a planet that contains a mineral the Empire wants so it can build its giant superlasers—that, “Ghorman is Greenland. Ghorman is anything. ‘We want the rare earth, we want this.’ It really is just a crude laundry list of moves that they have, and my earlier answer stands for the way it rhymes with the show.” Gilroy, who’s currently working on his new composer-minded movie Behemoth!, does sound happy to cut a little more loose in interviews now, though, calling the current situation in America “an absolute gothic nightmare.” As for Trump vs. The Empire: “You get out your Fascism For Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used?”

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