Tony Gilroy Reflects on ‘Andor’ Season 1 Finale, Including Luthen and Mon Mothma’s Key Moments, and Breaks Down Season 2 Timeline
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy answered some of the season’s burning questions, now that it’s finished its run. Some of the topics he touched upon include Luthen’s big day in the season finale, Mon Mothma’s fabricated story about her husband’s gambling, why showing Anto Kreegyr’s ambush was never in the cards, and why no directors from season 1 are coming back for season 2. He also confirmed that Duncan Pow will be back as Melshi in season 2, as expected.
After episode 11 aired on Disney Plus, some speculated that, since we never saw a body, Maarva might have faked her death to rally the troops against the Empire. While this was ultimately not the case, Gilroy did say that he liked the idea after seeing it online:
“I heard that theory! I heard that theory, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s a legit idea.’ I was like, ‘Wow, they snuck the body out and they did the whole thing,’ so it’s a legit idea. But no, Maarva was absolutely dead.”
The episode closes with Luthen and Andor finally joining forces. But there is more to that; as Gilroy told The Hollywood Reporter, Luthen had a pretty good day overall:
“Yeah, it’s a big day for Luthen. When he’s listening to Maarva’s speech, it’s not pride of ownership on his part. It is and it isn’t, but it’s another corner of the farm he’s trying to grow. So he’s very proud when he hears that. And my God, to finish up the day and have this new asset walk in — who’s been through all this stuff and is still standing and you managed not to kill — and he is now basically saying, ‘Alright, I’m in. Blood oath,’ that’s a pretty good day, I think. “
Meanwhile, Mon Mothma wasn’t having her best day. Gilroy confirmed in the interview that she fabricated the story about his husband’s gambling being behind the missing money in her account, and then added the following when asked why she decided to go through with her daughter’s marriage:
“She’s just trying to cover all the tracks. Sculdun originally came in and said, ‘Oh, I know your husband.’ So, in the end, Sculdun probably thinks that this is really about her husband’s gambling debts. He doesn’t know what the real purposes are. But what I’m saying there is that she’s just covering all the bases. If anybody comes looking, if anybody’s wondering why she might be borrowing money or if Sculdun is wondering why she might be borrowing money, she can lay it off on poor Perrin [Alastair Mackenzie].”
Speaking of Mon Mothma, in another interview with Deadline, Gilroy hinted that the character’s arc in the season was in part inspired by Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House for the past four years:
“Her job description is Senator, longtime politician, power player, doesn’t get everything she wants, doesn’t get everything he wants. I certainly wasn’t thinking about the American Speaker of the House when I was writing the scripts.”
He was also asked by The Hollywood Reporter about the post-credits scene, which finally revealed what the prisoners at Narkina 5 were building. However, instead of taking a larger role than in season 1, Gilroy said that the Death Star will still be a looming threat happening in the background in the second season:
“It’ll still be the looming threat. Rogue One is all about discovering what it is. [Season two is] about who picks up the final breadcrumbs that lead to the beginning of Rogue One. In Rogue One, Cassian goes to the Ring of Kafrene to meet Tivik, who is from Saw’s group, and he says, ‘Oh my God, it’s a planet killer.’ Cassian knows some shit, but he’s looking for answers. So we’ll [cover] the breadcrumbs that lead up to that, sure. But we have a situation where Cassian will never know that what he was building is actually the machine that’s going to kill him.”
The conversation also covered briefly the topic of Anto Kreegyr, who was successfully ambushed by the Empire, as Luthen had planned. Gilroy explained why it was never in the cards for them to include that sequence in the series:
“Well, in the grammar of our show, I probably wouldn’t [have shown the Kreegyr ambush]. Our grammar is pretty rigorous. Without establishing Kreegyr as a speaking character, as someone that we’ve been with or some other peripheral character who’s there or something, I probably wouldn’t. We don’t ever go anywhere where one of our characters isn’t walking us into it, [Death Star] Easter egg aside and a few extreme cases like that. Even with our camera, our grammar is very rigorous about what we allow ourselves to do in the perspective we are allowed to have. So, probably not.”
Bix was asked about Kreegyr in episode 11, but we never got to hear the answer. According to the writer, it’s because she had no answer:
“The scene ends before anything, but she’s just literally breaking down there. She doesn’t have an answer for them. She doesn’t have anything that they want.”
In an interview over the summer, composer Nicholas Britell had said that the first work he did for the score on the series was music that was meant to be played on set. In episode 12, we finally got to see what he meant. Gilroy confirmed that this was indeed the first part of the score they got done, and that happened six months before the rest of the music:
“That’s the first thing that we did together. We didn’t really even know each other. That’s the first project we did before we started shooting. We did that and some of the Ferrix banging and stuff. And then we didn’t see each other for like six months, but we did that first, yeah. We fell in love doing that.”
Moving on to season 2, we know that each block of three episodes will be covering each year in between the events of season 1 and the beginning of Rogue One. Gilroy confirmed that each block will be contained, covering just a handful of days from each of those years, before jumping forward another year:
“They are actually super condensed. They’re like three days, four days, two weeks, four days. They’re really tight. It’s cool that way. That’s what’s exciting about it. You can go away for a year, come back for Friday, Saturday and Sunday and then jump a year. So they won’t be spread out. It won’t be like block two takes place over another year. So they’re very concentrated, which is fun. And then you have to account for all the negative space and what happened in the interim.”
Deadline also asked Gilroy in their interview to give a small tease of what’s to come in the second season, to which the Andor showrunner responded the following:
“We will be dealing with, by the time you get to Rogue One, you have the Rebel Alliance, which is a whole bunch of different disparate factions and people that have arrived at Yavin and have coalesced into what will become an organized rebellion. Well, we have four years to examine how difficult it is to put a revolution together, how difficult it is to become a leader, how difficult it is to be a victim.
But what happens to the original gangsters? What happens to the outliers? What happens to the people who were…every revolution consumes people and glorifies people, and not always the people that did the thing that mattered. How do you scale up something that essentially does not thrive in sunshine? How do you that? And those issues and all the chaos of that is going to be of great interest to us going forward.
Duncan Pow, who plays Melshi, will be back. Obviously, we’re playing there with that, because he’s going to be in Rogue One.”
The second season, which is currently filming in the U.K., will be directed by a new set of people. When asked about why they didn’t bring back the season 1 directors, Gilroy explained in his interview with The Hollywood Reporter that they tried really hard, but it just wasn’t possible:
“Man, we tried really hard. Ben [Caron] didn’t want to come back because he had his movie [Sharper] with Julianne Moore. He’s a big feature director now, so he wants to see how his feature goes. We also wanted Toby [Haynes] to come back really badly, but he got jammed up on Black Mirror. So he couldn’t give us a decision in time, and we had to pull the trigger.
It’s very hard getting directors. There’s a lot of people who are shopping for the same people all the time, and there’s only a certain number of people. It’s not easy to do this show. You can’t learn on this job, and we can’t take big chances with these blocks. People have to be pretty experienced, and so that’s a smaller group. There’s a billion shows and everybody is scrounging for people. And a lot of people have a psychological impediment. They say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do season two.’ And we’re like, ‘This is not season two. It’s a whole other thing.’ And so it’s a lot of work getting directors. It was way more difficult than I ever thought.”
It’s clear that they approached people to direct for season 2 before the first season aired, because Andor has now become a favorite of the industry even if it’s struggled to win over audiences. After gathering some of the best reviews of any Star Wars project ever, apparently, it’s also been the talk of the town over at studio headquarters.
Andor season 2 will stream on Disney Plus sometime in 2024, likely toward the end of the summer.
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.
