‘Andor’ Is the Most Grounded ‘Star Wars’ Can Get, Diego Luna Confirms No Jedi Around
New interviews with the cast and crew of the upcoming series Andor are teasing a more realistic Star Wars show than usual. The series will deal with the formation of the Rebel Alliance leading up to the Battle of Scarif and subsequently the Battle of Yavin, but ultimately, it will be a series about the people that formed the Rebellion.
In a recent interview with Screen Rant, Diego Luna was asked what Andor will explore that the rest of the Star Wars Disney Plus slate hasn’t. The actor responded:
“I wouldn’t say it that way. What I would say is that Andor is the most grounded Star Wars you’ll get. This is about the people. There’s no Jedi around, and it’s very dark times in the galaxy. It’s when the people have to come together, articulate a response, and work in communities because the Empire is growing and control is everywhere. People have been marginalized, and there’s no freedom. You have these communities having to react. It’s the most human that the experience of Star Wars can get. This Star Wars is about regular people like you and me, and I think that connection is going to be special. It’s the most realistic—if you can say realistic, because obviously, they live in a galaxy far, far away. But it should feel realistic to you, because we want that proximity. We want you to reflect [on] yourself with these characters on this journey.”
In another interview with Variety, Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy reaffirmed Luna’s sentiments:
“I wanted to do it about real people. They’ve made all this IP about the royal family, in essence. It’s been great. But there’s a billion, billion, billion other beings in the galaxy. There’s plumbers and cosmeticians. Journalists! What are their lives like? The revolution is affecting them just as much as anybody else. Why not use the ‘Star Wars’ canon as a host organism for absolutely realistic, passionate, dramatic storytelling?”
He also teased that there will be legacy characters popping up in season 1, but it was never done in a fan service way. With Andor being set five years before the original Star Wars, and concurrently with Star Wars: Rebels, there is a lot of room for familiar faces to appear.
Kyle Soller, who plays the Imperial Security Bureau officer Syril Karn, couldn’t believe it was a Star Wars script:
“It was completely different from what I expected the Star Wars scripts to look like. I had to flip back and look at the title: No, this is Star Wars. I just felt like, ‘Wow, this is incredibly grown up, gritty, messy.’”
That grounded nature also happened on set, where no green screens were involved, and everything was built. Adria Arjona, who plays Cassian’s friend on the planet Ferrix Bix Caleen, told Variety:
“I imagined that I was either going to be on a green screen, or that I would have been in front of a virtual set. They created an entire city. Ferrix actually exists. I was there.”
Denise Gough, who plays Supervisor Dedra Meero, was also very impressed on set:
“There was what looked like a sushi bar, and I looked in one of the bowls and there were blue noodles. In the next one, there was a skewer with some sort of strange animals on it. I thought, ‘Wow, nobody’s ever going to see this. This is all done for us.’”
The trailers and promotional material released to this point depict real-world parallels and a show even more grounded than Rogue One. We will see it for ourselves when the first three episodes of Andor arrive on Disney Plus on September 21.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
