Andor is currently in the midst of airing its thrilling, sometimes emotionally harrowing second season on Disney+, following Diego Luna’s mercenary-turned-Rebel-spy as he navigates the five years before giving his life for the cause in 2016’s Rogue One. This week, the show released the season’s best batch of episodes to date, including “Who Are You?”, a fantastic hour cataloguing, in exacting detail, how an Imperial massacre is executed.
The morning after those episodes went live, we sat down with series creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy to talk about this season, including his influences, the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of respecting the established canon of Star Wars cartoons, and the ways the show incorporates and reflects on the political moments that fuel it.
The A.V. Club: Having reviewed the show, I knew that “Who Are You?” was going to be a big episode for people. How do you construct a flashpoint like what happens in Palmo Plaza?
Tony Gilroy: Absent all the housekeeping that we did with the calendar, and getting the Ghorman massacres lined up the way they should be, right? We have the Tarkin Massacre from Legends, and there was some confusion about where things were on the calendar. And there’s nothing canonical about Ghorman whatsoever. It starts with building Ghorman, with giving a reason for the massacre. I was probably pretty pleased to find a way to link it to the Emperor’s Energy Project. [Note: This is the show’s coded language for the Death Star.]
I think if you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna do a massacre. Like everything else in the show, if we’re gonna do something, we really want to go for it. I mean, long answer, but it was also encouraging, in a productive-writing kind of way, to see how Ghorman could be the very attractive point of convergence for Luthen and the Empire. Everybody wants to be there. Everybody wants it, and all the characters can play there organically. So you’re building it, you’re sketching it, you’re trying to diagram it up. All these pieces are lining up in a way [that makes] you kind of go, “Okay, this is gonna be a big deal.”
You can imagine, by looking at it, how much work goes into it. All kinds of different pieces and all the departments. What are we capable of? Taking it down to its smallest level. It gets down into the national anthem. It gets down into, “What would that be like?” That’s a very crazy long answer. But I mean, you just go all the way with it.
AVC: Researching for this conversation, I was fascinated to learn you were a fan of Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast. Watching that episode, I kept finding myself thinking, “This is such a Mike Duncan moment.”
TG: Yeah, but from, like, seven different episodes! That’s a great series. All during COVID, that whole COVID year, I was listening to that. What a great show.
AVC: I was interested in the decision to have the Empire explicitly ignite the situation, especially since Luthen has never been shy about wanting violence on Ghorman to break out, too.
TG: I think he’s also tactical enough to know that the risks of his fingerprints on things is…I’m sure he’s capable of doing something like that, and I’m sure he has done things like that. He’s an accelerationist; he’s an advocate of that technique. But in this case, he doesn’t have to.
It’s hard to remember the provenance of everything. I think that that was Danny [Gilroy’s brother and co-writer on the series, Dan Gilroy], the young recruits being brought in. And Danny said, “I’m gonna use them as lambs. They’re gonna be the lambs to the slaughter here.” And yeah, I mean, it’s happened. It’s happened before.
AVC: “Who Are You?” also ends the story of Kyle Soller’s Syril Karn. Season two spends a lot of time on his relationship with Dedra. How do you build that connection so that it lands in these big moments?
TG: I don’t think you start with the ending here. It’s really step by step. You’re always torn. I’m not a very good agenda writer. “Oh, here’s the issue; I wanna write to this.” I don’t really work that way. I’m working plank by plank to try to get people where they would naturally go. And maybe because you have it as an echo in the back of your consciousness, you’re subconsciously leading yourself to that. But they just sort of inevitably fell into that path.
I did always know that Syril would face his big crisis here, that this would be the place that all the fantasies lost their wings. He’d have to really face everything. How that exactly played out with Dedra–we sort of have a marathon relay race, is how we do the writing. I probably had some of it before we went to the room; it got better in the room; Danny did a bunch of drafts; and then I took over. We went forward. It probably just kept building, you know, until we finally realized what we could get.
AVC: I have a wonkish fan theory that Dedra is basically Syril’s fantasy of the Empire, and he’s watching it fall apart in the moment.
TG: I love hearing that. I never thought of that before, but if you’re writing really well, everything should be tied together, so it should be that way. I think there’s some legitimacy to that. She represents, you know, what does he want? I’ve been out on the road, and people talking about Syril, after season one—people maybe had the wrong impression of who he was, at least in my mind.
To me, he’s a romantic character. I see people saying that on their own now. I think people realize what a sad fantasist he is and how ruined he’s been by his search for order. And, I mean, his growing up with Eedy and the chaos of that, who wouldn’t? His need for order is very easy to understand. I think he could have found that order in a number of places. I don’t think it necessarily had to be under the boot of the Empire. But that’s where he found it. That’s where he’s planted his flag, that’s what’s embraced him. And yeah, I think she kind of is the new alpha predator that he’s willing to submit to.
AVC: Andor often plays a long game with keeping its characters distant from each other. How conscious a choice is that, and what goes into finally getting these people in the same room together?
TG: Man, it’s really hard to get characters together. It’s really hard to do that. People always ask about the Bourne movies. “Oh man, is it hard to do the action?” The hardest thing in the Bourne movies was to get two people in the same room together who are running away from each other. One of the coolest magic tricks in Andor is episode six, to get all these people in Sculdun’s gallery, you know, organically.
As I said earlier, that was one of the attractions of Ghorman. Everybody has a legit reason to be here. I don’t have to force anything or have a coincidence. You know, we have a little bit of fun when Syril and Cassian pass each other in the earlier block, when “Varian Skye” is making his first entrée into Ghorman. But this time, I mean, they’re legit. They’re both legitimately there.
AVC: And then, in the next episode, you have the first meeting between Cassian and Mon Mothma, which is a moment that carries a very potent impact.
TG: I knew I needed to do that. That had a very tricky piece of canon to deal with, which was the Rebels cartoon. And that is considered canon, so that has weight. How do you get around the fact that in, in that story, she’s rescued by the Gold Squadron? And, oh man, I don’t want to have to introduce like a whole bunch of new characters, or go with those characters. So you can see what we were doing there—you know, print the legend, not the story. That’s a construction project. That was something that was consciously built in that way. To have the whole show go along and not have them get together until, like, episode 10 in Yavin, I would’ve been disappointed with that.
AVC: It also plays into one of the larger themes of the season, which is the Rebellion’s discomfort with, if you want to call it the terrorist wing, or the Luthen wing.
TG: The uncontrolled… You know, my education came on Rogue. If you just look at the council meeting when Jyn Erso comes back to try to tell everybody they need to go to Scarif, look at that meeting. It’s just a mess. There’s five different arguments going on in there, and nobody gets along. That was my education. This is the win. This is the rebellion in Yavin. This is what you get.
I never forgot that. That’s a large part of what season two is about, isn’t it? Starting off in the first episode with the idiots in the Maya Pei Brigade. It’s a little bit of a sneaky introduction of the idea that’s gonna be blown out as the season goes along.
AVC: Speaking of navigating canon: This is the first set of Andor episodesto deal with any elements of the Force. How do you square the mystical elements of Star Wars with a show that’s so deliberately grounded?
TG: I think one of the first conversations that I had with Pablo Hidalgo, who’s, you know, the keeper of the keys out at Lucasfilm—he’s the librarian there of all this stuff—I said, “Honest to god, how many people, how many beings in this gigantic galaxy, are aware of the Force? Almost nobody. How many have ever seen a lightsaber? Almost nobody.” The previous material has given everybody a distorted view of what the demographic understanding is of the galaxy.
That was kind of interesting, and that was liberating in a way. At the same time, we would’ve been undernourished to not deal with one of the essential pieces of framework of the thing. It’s also really valuable to us—what the Force means, in this case, is an unwanted destiny. That’s a really cool thing to put on Diego Luna’s shoulders as we go along.
AVC: It’s fascinating, because Cassian is a character who’s very defined by wanting to choose his own destiny and the freedom to determine how he lives. And he’s a character we know is doomed.
TG: That’s exactly what I’m talking about, though. That’s what’s fascinating. He doesn’t want this. It’s a terrifying thing to be put into the harness of some sort of pathway that you just don’t want. Or, he also says, “I mean, I’ve done enough.” He says to Kleya, “I’ve done so much.” He says to Bix, “I’ve done so much; I’ve done enough.” And to feel like there’s just this river inside you that’s just gonna keep flowing and you can’t stop it. To play that into Rogue, I think really gives Rogue a new dimension. You know?
AVC: Have you re-watched Rogue One since finishing Andor?
TG: I have not. I’ve been afraid to. I was planning on doing it, but we’ve just been so busy, and I just haven’t made space for it. Other people around me have done it. So I’ve been reassured. And I’ve seen bits and pieces of it; it comes on, and you’re like, “Oh my god, holy crap. Look what that does.” But I haven’t done the comprehensive thing.
AVC: Andor often uses signifiers of real-world cultural institutions, especially in how it depicts the media. How do you thread the needle of those real-world elements?
TG: I’m not exactly sure what’s my viable alternative to that. I mean, what am I gonna do? We have Good Morning, Coruscant, you know? With Moffi and Toffi. Believe me, man, we are reinventing so many things and inventing so many things. It’s a relief to not have to invent absolutely everything. It just felt right. There is kind of a broadcast syntax, and there is kind of a broadcast grammar, that’s existed all the way since people got a microphone in their hand. They haven’t really changed that much. You go back and listen to early radio broadcasts and they’re still the same kind of thing. What would be the other version of that? I don’t know what else you’d do.
AVC: I’m thinking specifically of lines like, “You’ve been watching too much Imperial News,” maybe.
TG: Well, it’s about propaganda. Power always wants to control the narrative. Control the narrative and you control almost everything.That’s what every great propagandist does. I wouldn’t be doing a story about revolution, wouldn’t be doing justice to the mandate, if I didn’t include propaganda in there.
AVC: This is a show that depicts political violence in a way that Star Wars typically doesn’t—we watch Mon Mothma run, hard, into the limits of what she can do inside the system. It doesn’t shy away from the fact that what we’re watching is a violent revolution play out.
TG: I’m not sure what you’re asking me, though.
AVC: I’m sorry, I’m trying to grapple with one of the things that makes this show special to me, which is that it is honest about the fact that the Rebel Alliance is an actual revolutionary movement and not just some words that were written down.
TG: No, and on the flip side, the Empire is not just blowing up Alderaan, which is an abstract idea. It’s literally sniping people in the town square. All the heinous things are just as small and just as real. You don’t get one without the other. We’re trying to make it all, in the end. What’s the equivalent? You can have a hospital show where you’re, you know, 50 miles away from the operating room, and you’re talking about malfeasance in the administration. Or you have another one that’s taking you down into the operating theater and showing you where it happens. We’re going as low and molecular and as specific as we can. Everybody’s behavior is gonna come under scrutiny. And this is what revolution looks like. Welcome to the rebellion.
AVC: One final question: What is your reaction to people who attach specific real-world parallels to moments from the show? I’ll be honest and say I couldn’t not think about Gaza during some of the moments on Ghorman.
TG: You’ve already answered this question earlier on. I’ll put it on Mike Duncan: You listened to Revolutions. How many moments are there just like this, that are constantly–how many different people could say, “Oh, that’s mine. That belongs to me. This is my issue.”
What’s really exhausting about this question, and I guess what’s terrifying about it as well, is it’s a party that so many people can host. I’m not gonna make the list, because making a list just puts me in more trouble. You could find so many different places to put this and say, “This belongs to me.”
I’m hoping to make something, always trying to make work that isn’t disposable. I’m always trying to make stuff that people can go back and look at again. It’s not a one-time use, and it’s very pleasing to come up with material that has a timeless quality that it’s gonna speak to so many people. I’m rambling, but I’m really trying to say what I’ve been saying for the last five weeks, which is that it’s very sad, the amount of times that this has happened in history that people could choose to say “This belongs to me.”
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
