During the first season of Lucasfilm’s lavish “Star Wars” The series “Andor”, creator Tony Gilroy traveled to Scotland during production. On the back of a “sweet little hotel” he met Diego Luna, who played the title character, a thief that is radicalized to the growing uprising and plays a key role in the case of Empire’s First Death Star, as shown in 2016’s “Rogue One Star Wars Story.” Gilroy and Luna, together with Lucasfilm Manager Kathleen Kennedy, had mapped an ambitious five season arc that would describe Cassian Andor’s journey. But when it was time to think about season 2, they had other thoughts.
“We just met each other and said,” What f—? “Gilroy explained. “Physically you can’t do that.” They also questioned who would pay for five seasons of an extremely expensive, intricate designed and carefully planned space opera, which some critics have considered franchise’s greatest entry since the original “Star Wars 1977.” “It was only impossible. The amount of work that went into these two seasons is … You couldn’t do five,” Gilroy said.
So the creator and EP hatched another plan: every third episode of the show’s second season would jump forward in time with a year, as if the show Zooma through Hyperspace. The last cluster of section would end just before the events in “Rogue One.” “We came back to them and said,” Hi, we will do a second season where we do all four years during one season, “Gilroy said.” And they were like, “Ok, we’ll go for it.”
Gilroy said that the most difficult aspect of this approach was to convince the studio that it would work “without making all the grainy exhibition that would normally be belonging to it.” To prove that they could deduct it, Gilroy created proof of the concept: “I wrote the top and tail for each block to set the frame every year. And I took it into the author’s room so no one could say it would not work. And then we filled from there.”
The new structure galvanized “Andor” team. “It’s very exciting as a writer,” Gilroy said. “And it’s exciting for the actors as well. We were waiting for it to fail,” there must be something that will bite us here. “We were waiting for a Bugaboo that never showed up.”
While the show is now officially over, there are undoubtedly elements that will be explored in associated media – series, video games and the like. For his part, Gilroy is satisfied with his time in a galaxy far, far away and no longer sees himself as the gatekeeper for this particular piece of “Star Wars” mythology. “I drawn attention to strict attention to canon that I should pay attention to. I have ignored the canon I have to ignore,” he said. “I don’t own IP, so they can do whatever they want.”
When we asked how close “Andor” Season 2 was similar to what he originally intended to do, even Gilroy was not sure. “You spend so much time constructing and tearing down your imagination. It’s just such a constant process,” he said. Some scenes remained the same all the time, including a final confrontation between Denise Gough’s imperialist officer and Stellan Skarsgård’s rebel operative, as well as another where Andor meets a force healer. Others underwent endless iterations.
The last scene, with a protagonist who looked at a distance, at once heartbreaking and optimistic, was a Gilroy had dreamed up early in the show’s development. “I wanted to be able to feel like a sadist with what I did with these characters and have some hope,” he said. “Legit Hope. Not cheese-like t-shirt hope, but real hope.”
This story first ran in the drama issue of Thewrap’s Awards Magazine. Read more from the question here.
