(The editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for the “Andor“Season 2, sections 1-3.)
When Tony Gilroy decided to each block of “Andor” season 2 Section would take place one year intervals, he knew these blocks had to cover “the most intense three days” of each year. It started with the wedding, the “defining clock” for sections 1-3.
“Mon Mothma is just completely up – and my God, will Cassian come back in time to save everyone from my rau? And I’ve got Eedy for lunch,” Gilroy said with a chuckle in a conversation with IndieWire. “On paper, everyone was, really? But … her arrival for lunch is as heavy as any of these other things.”
Yes, as intense as things are with Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), we simply cannot move on without dealing with the new dynamics between Dedra (Denise Gough) and Syril (Kyle Soller). During season 1, the two Empire fanatics were separated when they closed to Cassian (Diego Luna) and the rebels, only came face to face in the last episodes (so close, in fact, that a certain critic that I feel whispered “Kiss” during the season 1 final).
Season 2 captures the fascist love birds not only in a relationship, but living together, a story that leans to comedy when Syril’s mother (Kathryn Hunter) will visit. Episodes 1-3 were directed by Ariel Kleiman, whom Gilroy called a “beautiful director” and was praised for Syril’s neurotic lunch speakers. Composer Brandon Roberts added Farce with a “1960s Sitcom -Cue” which Showrunner called “Inspired.”
“When you see them together it was delicious to write,” he said. “The empire, for her, is a god. For him it is a place for security – but he is a romantic. He is a fantasy, and he has a very high, imaginative inner conversation in his head … You probably know relationships like that, where two people want the same thing, and as long as their reason for it is not tested, everything will be ok.”
Gough was initially against all romantics for Dedra, so that it did not surpass the rest of her bow, but the character is very intact in the Season 2 premiere. She is still a hard -working space Nazi girls, and those who longed to see her share screen time with Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) were quickly rewarded in a scene that “lights the fuse on what will be a really integral part of the whole story.”
That fuse is ghorman, a bit peripheral Star Wars Lore who will be central to “Andor” season 2 – and is chilly introduced in this week’s section. As History Buff, Gilroy shared his fascination for the Wannsee conference in 1942, where the Nazis “basically had a PowerPoint -lunch to decide how to kill six million people.”
“It’s so in the temperature in our show … to use propaganda for a long time to destroy a culture,” he said. “One of the things that the propagandists will use is society’s isolation, the pride of society … Take it and use it as a weapon against them and look at that turn and see how effective propaganda can be to crawl that concept.”
“The concept of media, controlling media and how power controls media and weapons media … If you have the opportunity to make a 1500-page story about revolution and oppression and rebellion, it would really be a shame if you did not get that note from the court there somewhere.”
“Andor” season 2, sections 1-3 now flows on Disney+.
