One way out
ANDOR CREATOR TONY GILROY REFLECTS ON THE END OF A TRIUMPHANT JOURNEY
WORDS BEN TRAVIS
FOR THE FIRST time in a long while, Tony Gilroy doesn’t have Andor on his mind, or in his diary. “I’ve been really monomaniacally on this five-year calendar,” he says, referring to the time he’s spent turning Andor into one of the great Star Wars stories, across two seasons and 24 episodes. And now, it’s over. When Empire talks to Gilroy over Zoom, it’s the morning after the night before, the morning after the final three episodes of Andor dropped on Disney+, taking Diego Luna’s rebel captain Cassian Andor all the way up to Rogue One, the movie where Gilroy first connected with the character, and the beginning of Cassian’s end. Endings are very much on Gilroy’s mind right now. “There are so many different farewells and endings to the process,” he says. “And this is another one, perhaps a more definitive one.”
Don’t read too much into that. Gilroy isn’t hinting that there might be more Andor down the line. The story has been told, comprehensively. “We have no more potential,” he says. “It’s all out there. There’s nothing that we know that you don’t know.”