‘Andor’: Tony Gilroy, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller Discuss Length of the Series and Character Development

In a recent interview with ABC’s On the Red Carpet, Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy and actors Kyle Soller and Denise Gough have weighed in on how long a Star Wars series should be.

 

Gilroy took the occasion to highlight, yet again, why he’s so thankful for this opportunity — it’s not because he’s a Star Wars fan that has always wanted to play in this sandbox, but because he’s an immensely talented creator who was looking for a major platform to tell the story he wants with next to no limitations, and not just in terms of budget.

 

He said the following:

 

“There’s a new dial on everybody’s console, which is how long should my story be? Is it five episodes, is it seven, is it twelve? What is it? You gotta pick the right number!

[Grinning from ear to ear] It’s really fantastic to be able to stretch out, to have a Dickensian amount of characters and interact and tell a massive story. You don’t wanna waste time, you wanna keep your skills, your compression skills, but man… It’s very liberating.”

 

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

 

Gough, who plays Imperial supervisor Dedra Meero, explained that, as Gilroy has said before, the show was originally going to be five seasons long. But at some point during production for season 1, Diego Luna and Tony Gilroy met and decided they couldn’t do it for this long. Gilroy then compressed the story he had laid out for the following four seasons into a second and final season:

 

“We sort of signed up for five years. We thought there was gonna be five seasons of this, and then, thankfully, Diego was like ‘I’ll die if I do five seasons’. So they condensed it into this amazing, I don’t know how he’s done it, but he has, condensed… Tony Gilroy has managed to do one more season and you are gonna have told the whole story.”

 

Kyle Soller, who plays the Imperial Security Bureau agent Syril Karn, expressed how the fate of his character was, for a long time, a coin toss to Gilroy:

 

“Tony kind of condensed what was gonna happen for the rest of the season but he hadn’t written it yet. And he, when he was talking about Syril, he’s sort of like ‘At this point, is he a good guy, is he a bad guy? I don’t know! Is he gonna end up like this, is he gonna end up like that? I don’t know!’ And I was like, ‘Ok, man, I’ll just take that as a starting point and use that gray area and complexity like is he or isn’t he?'”

 

 

Gough weighed in and confirmed that her character will stay on the Imperial side the whole way through. There’s no angle with her other than the fact that she’s completely against our heroes:

 

“[Speaking to Soller] But that makes total sense to give you that note before it even starts, so even within creating a character you’re like ‘I’m not sure’. But it was like, he needed me to commit to ‘Don’t try to make this girl sweet and nice underneath it all.’ He just wanted me to go hell for leather.”

 

The hype is through the roof, and Gilroy might be responsible for most of it. From all accounts, it seems like Andor will push the boundaries of Star Wars storytelling and tell a grounded, complex, and layered story set in a galaxy far, far away. The series acts as a prequel to Rogue One and will tie in directly with the movie with the series finale, as Gilroy has explained in past interviews.

 

The first three episodes of Andor season 1 will start streaming on Disney Plus on September 21, with new episodes hitting the platform on a weekly basis thereafter. Season 2 will begin production in the fall, with both entries being 12 episodes long.

 

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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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