‘Andor’: What We Know About the Story and How the Series Came to Be

We are less than a month away from the release of Andor, the new Star Wars live-action series centered around the title character that was first introduced in Rogue One. The series will also depict how the Rebel Alliance was formed in the five years leading up to the mission to steal the Death Star plans, and will include characters like Mon Mothma and Saw Gerrera.

 

Tony Gilroy is the series’ showrunner and main writer. As he revealed at Star Wars Celebration in May, Andor will be two seasons long, with the first year capturing the events of the first year in the aforementioned timeline, and the second season, the remaining four years. In his own words:

 

“The series is a prequel to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. It rewinds back five years from the events of Rogue One to follow Cassian Andor on his journey to get to the movie. We’ve done twelve episodes for the first season. The twelve episodes that we’ve done cover one year in time. We’re going to do another twelve that are going to take us over the next four years into Rogue One.”

 

Both Gilroy and lead actor Diego Luna have said multiple times over the past couple of months that the second and final season will lead us directly into the events of the movie, possibly hinting that the final scene in the show could see Cassian in the moments right before he’s introduced in the movie. “The final scene will walk you into Rogue One,” Gilroy said at Celebration.

 

The Inception

Cassian Andor

 

Then-Disney CEO Bob Iger announced the series back in 2018, including the return of Diego Luna, and though they have now been forgotten, the show did go through some creative shifts in its early days. Following the November 2018 announcement, it was reported that The Americans producer Stephen Schiff would act as showrunner. A rumor in January 2019 suggested that the show could begin filming as soon as October of that year. In April 2019, when the launch date for Disney Plus was confirmed, Bob Iger also confirmed that K-2SO would be appearing in the series, with Alan Tudyk returning. The Luna-Tudyk pair was brought out on stage at Lucasfilm’s presentation at D23 in August of that year. A couple of months later, in October, it was reported that Tony Gilroy, who had helped steer the Rogue One ship back in 2016, had joined the series as a writer and director. Production wouldn’t start until December 2020, and season one was eventually confirmed to not feature K-2SO. What happened exactly?

 

Details are a bit fuzzy here, though we can connect some dots. Diego Luna told Vanity Fair earlier this year that he got a call from Tony Gilroy with the breakdown of the entire Andor story in mid-2019. This suggests that at some point that year, Lucasfilm decided to give Gilroy a call, possibly as they decided Schiff’s direction was not working. Pre-production was probably halted, and once Gilroy was brought on board, he decided to map out the entire storyline of the show with the help of his writers’ room. They most likely wrote all of it in the following year. (Gilroy told Empire Magazine earlier this year that the series is 1500 pages long.) According to Luna, he was originally told it would be a twelve-episode series, which is probably why Lucasfilm was confident enough to bring out Tudyk at D23. Whether that was the case or not, at some point the writers decided on a two-season arc that wouldn’t include the beloved droid until season 2. (We know for sure that he is appearing then.)

 

Ever since he was brought on board and, as he did with Rogue One, course-corrected the show, everything has been a very smooth process for Andor. Casting for the series took place in the second and third quarters of 2020, with filming beginning in late November/early December of that year. It took place all over the U.K., with multiple production units shooting at the same time during certain points. It lasted nine months, finally wrapping at some point in August 2021.

 

 

Gilroy explains his approach to the series in Andor‘s production briefing, a 29-page document that contains a lot of details about the production, as follows:

 

“When we did Rogue One, it was fascinating to work with the different characters that were there, but the movie was such an ensemble piece, we only got snapshots and glimpses into all the different characters’ lives. I tried to make them as interesting as possible, but they were glimpses. Digging deeper into the life of Cassian Andor, you realize that this guy has this incredibly complicated and long history. He arrives in Rogue One, and he’s the consummate spymaster warrior. He’s the one person that the whole Rebel Alliance is going to trust with this assignment. So, he’s the tip of the spear. How did he get to be the tip of the spear? How did he get to have all of the skills that are required for that?”

 

Gilroy is also a big advocate for practical effects, real sets, and props. This was one of his requirements when prepping for Andor:

 

“One thing that we really wanted to make sure was that in this show everything is real. That was our initial instinct going forward, and that’s what we’ve tried to adhere to. Everything has to be real and that filters down from a design, it filters down through the camera department, it filters down through the actors, for sure, and it really filters down into the writing and the behavioral writing and the kinds of scenes that you can write and the topics that you’re going to deal with.”

 

The Story

Andor

 

From the very beginning, Andor was described as a spy thriller that would depict the dirty side of the rebellion. For Gilroy, being given almost free range in this genre was a blessing. As he explains, the story of Andor will start very contained, focused on this one character, and will start to spread out as he starts to meet and interact with other people. He is our point of view, and the main driver of the narrative:

 

“The thriller genre provides a chance to dig deep into complicated behavioral problems between people, and watch people make decisions that are difficult. We’re going to start with one thriller by having the Cassian Andor story go all the way through this. But as he impacts other people all around him, and as other people get involved, we spread out and go wide with the story. We’re carrying a lot of characters, and as they spin out, they all have their own thrillers. I’m really pleased with the fact we could keep so much combustion, and so much kinetic tension, and so much adrenaline in all of our subplots. And it means when they collide in the story, and when they come together, it just adds all this extra heat. From a storytelling point of view, it’s pretty exciting.”

 

When we meet Cassian in Andor, he will be a very different person from the character portrayed in Rogue One. He is now living in Ferrix with his adopted family, led by his adoptive mother Maarva Andor (Fiona Shaw), and in the first episode, he is at his lowest point. Gilroy explained:

 

“He’s a very different person than the accomplished warrior-spy that we meet in Rogue One. He’s sort of an adopted son of a family that saved his life, and he’s grown up on this planet, Ferrix, in a really strong community. And he is kind of the guy that nobody wants to see right now. He owes money to everybody. His mom’s on his case all the time, and he’s certainly not lived up to his potential at this point. He makes a situation infinitely worse in the opening scenes of the show—he’s become a fugitive. He’s had the worst day of his life when we start the show. We’re going to spend twenty-four episodes, exploring his odyssey to become the person who gives his life for the galaxy.”

 

Andor
Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) in Lucasfilm’s ANDOR, exclusively on Disney+. ©2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

 

According to canon, Cassian is 21 at this point. After breaking down the latest trailer earlier this month, we assume that the Empire is invading Ferrix, forcing Cassian to get off-world and start his journey as a migrant. Let us remember that the production name for the Andor series was Pilgrim, and that is no coincidence. Cassian will be a traveler through foreign lands in the series until he finds a new home in the Rebel Alliance. Through this journey, he will encounter a lot of new characters that will be introduced in the series. Toby Haynes, who directed six of the twelve episodes from season one, explained it as follows:

 

“Every character that you’ll meet in ‘Andor’ will have two sides to them, and it’s about peeling away the layers of those characters and showing all sides of people—the choices that they make, which side they are on and who they affiliate with. Star Wars is this incredible galaxy with loads of interesting planets to explore, but what I really think is interesting about what Tony is doing is that he’s exploring the mind and the ideas of what it is to be a rebel.”

 

Haynes also explained Gilroy’s take on the Rebel Alliance as follows:

 

“That’s one of the things that Tony Gilroy is trying to say about Cassian is that you don’t necessarily need to be heroic to be useful to the Resistance. The rebellion needs people who are ready to go that extra step and do what needs to get done. It’s about taking the audience into a much more interesting moral area where you’re rooting for a character, but as it’s evolving you might see them do things that you don’t necessarily agree with.”

 

Andor - Dedra Meero
Supervisor Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) in Lucasfilm’s ANDOR, exclusively on Disney+. ©2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.

 

To Gilroy, the most fascinating aspect of making Andor was getting the chance to explore precisely those moral gray areas that haven’t been really depicted in Star Wars before, thus bringing in a new perspective to the franchise:

 

“‘Andor’ is a story about many things, but at the center of it is a story about revolution and about everyday people making decisions in a very extreme moment in Star Wars history. We’re treating it as a very serious story about the education of a leader and the building of a rebellion. Characters really have to make decisions all the way down the line—how people make decisions, how they fail to make the proper decisions, how they betray each other when
they’re weak, what bravery means, what altruism really means, what evil and oppression really mean. The chance to chew on all that material is why I’m here.”

 

We will judge for ourselves in just a few weeks, when Andor has its three-episode premiere, on September 21. Stay tuned for more news and coverage on the new series!

 

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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.

Miguel Fernandez

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.

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