EXCLUSIVE!

ROGUE ONE HERO IS BACK! SHOWRUNNER TONY GILROY, AND STARS DIEGO LUNA AND GENEVIEVE O’REILLY, TELL SFX ABOUT THE BOURNE-INSPIRED PREQUEL SERIES THAT’S “MAKING IT REAL”

WORDS: RICHARD EDWARDS

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna): a boy in the hood.

cASSIAN ANDOR IS dead. Even by the standards of Rogue One – aka the Star Wars movie where everybody dies – the Rebel Alliance operative’s demise by Death Star was pretty definitive. If he was a parrot, he’d be bereft of life, pushing up daisies and joining the choir invisible – an ex-Rebel. But as Obi-Wan Kenobi proved earlier this year, being canonically dead is no barrier to having your own TV show.

“We’re not bringing him back from the dead, not at all,” laughs Diego Luna, who reprises his Rogue One role in new Disney+ prequel series Andor. “He sacrificed everything for the cause and that hasn’t changed, but I think what is beautiful is to say, ‘Okay, now that you care about him, now that you know what he’s capable of, we’re going to tell you where things started and how difficult that journey was.’ I think it’s an interesting approach and a really cool way to start an idea. Normally we work the other way around, but it’s kind of nice to not be worrying about how to surprise people at the end. Instead, let’s create an interesting journey of someone who has an awakening so profound that it makes him willing to sacrifice everything. But what gets him there?”

The man charged with giving Cassian a credible history is Tony Gilroy, the Michael Clayton director and Bourne franchise screenwriter who famously oversaw the extensive Rogue One reshoots that are now widely credited with saving the movie. As showrunner on Andor, Gilroy has crafted a backstory in which Cassian’s homeworld was destroyed during his childhood. Now – some five years before the fateful mission of Rogue One – the adopted planet he calls home is about to be crushed under the metaphorical iron boot of the Galactic Empire. And frankly there wouldn’t be much of a show if Andor simply stood by and let it happen.

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“We’re going to tell Cassian’s whole origin story, from his childhood to his adopted home and through,” explains Gilroy. “My pitch to Kathy [Kennedy, Lucasfilm president] and Diego was that he’s got to start as far away [from the character he becomes in Rogue One] as he can possibly be. I mean, to have the various attributes he has – to be empathetic and to be conscious to the point where you would give yourself for the galaxy, where you can be seductive, and you can lie, where we see him follow orders and go against orders… It’s like, ‘How do you get to that point?’ I wanted to make that journey as difficult as possible, so that you couldn’t imagine the guy five years earlier is going to be the guy in Rogue.”