ANDOR
SEASON 2
THE FIRST SEASON WAS ONE OF THE MOST THRILLING STAR WARS OUTINGS IN AEONS. WE SPEAK TO CREATOR TONY GILROY AND HIS CAST ABOUT TAKING THE SHOW TO HYPERSPACE
WORDS MIKE RYAN
OUT 23 APR
Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) and Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård);
Tony Gilroy was, as he puts it, “fucked”. His original grand concept for Andor had been sold to Disney as five sprawling seasons, each consisting of 12 episodes. During production of its first season, though, Gilroy realised he had no realistic way of pulling this off. “Oh my God, we are going to have to come up with another 12 hours of story?” he remembers thinking, back when he needed to start work on the second season. “So I was already panicked. We already said we were going to do five years [of timeline], that was the concept. How do you get out of that?”
While still filming the first season in Scotland, over a glass of Scotch with star Diego Luna, an idea was hatched. “We were figuring out how fucked we were with the concept that we’d ever be able to do this for five years,” says Gilroy. “Out of that desperation came… it’s a life raft, right?”
We first met Cassian Andor in 2016’s Rogue One, directed by Gareth Edwards and co-written by Gilroy. Cassian was a Rebel intelligence officer, part of a team of Rebels responsible for stealing the plans for the Death Star; Andor picked up five years before those events, as we saw Cassian go from, let’s say, down on his luck with not much hope for his future, to someone with an important purpose. But there’s still a lot of story to tell.
Covert ops for Dilan (Théo Costa-Marini), Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and Enza Rylanz (Alaïs Lawson);
Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) with Dedra Meero (Denise Gough);
Creator Tony Gilroy with O’Reilly.
After Gilroy and Luna’s Scotch revelation, the idea of five seasons was scrapped. The second season, which will pick up a year after the events of the first, consists of four three-episode “blocks”. Each block will cover a concentrated period of just a few days in the life of Cassian Andor and the formation of the Rebel Alliance. The next block will jump then ahead a full year, allowing the season to span four full years, finally ending literally right before the events of Rogue One. “There’s no mystery about where we are going,” says Gilroy. “We are going to end up on that walk out to the ship with [droid] K-2 and go to the Rings of Kafrene and start Rogue One. But why is Cassian going ? He’s going because there’s been some intel.”