Tony Gilroy Dives Deep Into ‘Andor’, Including Its Biggest Challenges, Kino Loy’s Fate, and Why It Was Delayed Three Weeks
Tony Gilroy is once again not shying away from giving us all the answers we were looking for. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Gilroy discussed a lot of burning questions about the show, including Kino Loy’s fate after episode 10, how they came up with the entire prison setting, why was Andor delayed a few weeks back in August, and a lot more. He is the showrunner of the series, wrote the first three episodes and the last two, and has overseen the entire process from the moment he was brought on in 2019.
The following story contains spoilers for Andor episode 10, One Way Out.
Gilroy first confirmed that Lucasfilm is so far thrilled with how the show has performed, particularly when it comes to the critical reception, and added that they are now relieved both House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power have wrapped their seasons, so they can be the only fantasy show in town. He also explained that it was the competition that swayed Lucasfilm to move Andor‘s original release date:
“Everybody’s really [happy]. I’ve never had reviews or affirmation like this in my life, for anything. And the passion of the people who’ve been following along is just overwhelming, man. I don’t know what else to say. It’s humbling. So yeah, I think everybody’s happy with that. Everybody’s pleased that [House of the Dragon] and [Rings of Power] are now out of the way, and I think a lot of people have been waiting for someone to tell them that it’s okay to watch [Andor] now or whatever.
It’s interesting because we changed our original date [from Aug. 31 to Sep. 21]. We were going to come out right with them, but it really wasn’t on our radar. I’m not sure that streaming dating has reached the level of military articulation that movie releasing has. It’s weird. I know that massive chess pieces of money are moving around the table on these shows, but a lot of people are doing things for the first time.”
In terms of why each writer got to do each episode arc, Gilroy gave the following explanation as to why his brother Dan did the heist arc (episodes 4-6) and Beau Willimon did the prison break arc (episodes 8-10):
“Well, Danny and I came in with the same sort of skill set; Beau had a different skill set. Beau is the guy who really beat the shit out of us in terms of the plotting and the whiteboard. We really only did the writers’ room for five or six days, but Beau hadn’t really done any action before. So maybe that had something to do with it. Danny and I have done a lot of stuff like that so it was familiar territory, but it could have easily gone the other way.”
His other brother, John Gilroy, was also a co-editor on some of the episodes of season 1, including episode 6, The Eye. According to Tony Gilroy, this one was the hardest nut to crack in terms of editing:
“Six was very hard to put together, so I would say yeah. I’m trying to think of where Johnny and I had the most arguments. (Laughs.) Yeah, six was tough. Twelve was very, very tough, but in a fun way. It’s just a very big meal. It’s very abundant and it has a lot of things to deal with. But yeah, six was tough. A lot more editorial went into six than most episodes. “
He was also asked about what the prisoners are building in their shifts, and though he didn’t give a straight answer, he hinted at some potential season 2 ties:
“They’re building season two. (Laughs.) It’s the spine of season two. I’ve heard all kinds of things; it’s great. All of the material that the Empire has, I look at everything like, ‘Economically, how does this work? Who built Scarif? How do you build that? How do you build Eadu? How do you build The Death Star and this armada of ships?’ There’s a lot of things that need to be built, and there’s an incredible amount of material. So, to me, what they’re building is not as important as the scale of it. When you go to the Imperial Bureau of Standards where Syril works, you go, ‘Oh my God,’ and he’s just working at the Fuel Purity desk. But that’s what it takes to run this Empire. So the scale of it is really what we’re trying to suggest here.”
Gilroy also explained how they came up with the entire concept of the prison when trying to make something different from everybody else, and how it THX 1138 inspired production designer Luke Hull:
“That’s fascinating because when we got into the room, I knew that Cassian goes to prison. But everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, a fucking prison. How do you do anything new?’ Because we were not going to do what anybody had done before. We were just absolutely adamant about that. That’s the rule. So I honestly don’t know who said electric floors first in the flurry of all the shit happening, but someone said electric floors. And all of a sudden, we were like, ‘Oh my God, what does that mean?’ And so we spent the whole day building the prison, and Luke was there with us, building the prison.
We got so crazy about this stuff. A lot of people think the prison is just white, but there’s a billion kinds of white. When we were doing the ISB conference room, we also had to figure out our whites and how much gray was in it. But I think there were pictures up from THX 1138. I know we had pictures up from The Conformist, so I’m sure there were pictures up from THX, of those whites. So it’s a happy convergence, and it’s really pleasing and cool that it’s George Lucas’ first movie. But we definitely went back and looked at it afterwards, and were like, ‘Oh my God, look at those whites.'”
In terms of teases, Gilroy then gave the big one of them all. After Kino Loy’s last moments in episode 10, most viewers assumed the character was dead. But Tony Gilroy, taking a page out of Dave Filoni’s playbook, isn’t so sure. When asked if he presumes Kino was executed shortly after, Gilroy said:
“I don’t know. He’s not dead. Is he dead? I don’t see him dying [in episode ten].”
The prison break block brought back into the picture Duncan Pow as Melshi from Rogue One, and we then see him again running away with Cassian on the beach after escaping. Gilroy said the following about including the character in the scripts, and how it ties Andor even more nicely with the 2016 movie:
“I love the character. Duncan Pow, who plays Melshi, was a great hang on Rogue, and I just really liked him. So I was just like, ‘How can we get him back in?’ There will be some other things along the way that we’ll do, but the prison just seemed like a great place to show where and how they meet.”
Moving over to Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen, Gilroy said the following about his overall state of mind in the series, and how that was then translated into his speech in episode 10:
“Well, he’s a chess player, man. He’s sacrificing a castle to protect his queen. So I don’t think the Kreegyr story is over yet. Luthen is in a very tough spot, and his position over the next five years is only going to get more complicated, because how do you build this network? Earlier on, he says that he’s been building it for 10 or 12 years, but all of a sudden, with Aldhani, they’re going loud. All of a sudden, they’re going to expose themselves. And in a classic political sense, he’s an accelerationist. He believes in the fact that you have to make it hurt really bad in order to bring people to change.
Once you make that announcement [via the Aldhani heist in episode six], once you do that, you’re no longer in charge of the thing that you’ve put out there. So how do you juggle your paranoia? How do you maintain your secrecy? How do you go big and stay small and tight? How do you expand while expansion makes you more vulnerable? Those are going to be issues. You’re seeing the beginning of those issues in episode ten and in this tranche. That’s also one of the major food groups that we’ll be dealing with in the second season.
[It’s provoking the Empire into making things worse,] it’s called accelerationism. I think that’s the dialectical term. It covers all sides of the political spectrum. It could be left, right; it could be anywhere. But it’s the idea of, ‘I can’t get people to do something unless they really feel it.’ And that’s a classic revolutionary leadership move all the way through. I mean, you could go back 2000 years and find people that were doing that.”
Previous scenes with Skarsgård included a lot of Easter eggs in the background that fans have been having a great time pointing out. Gilroy confirmed that, not only he had nothing to do with them, but he didn’t even know about them until the show was on the air and saw them on the Internet:
“We have Pablo Hidalgo. He’s sort of the curia of the Vatican up there at Lucasfilm. He’s the final voice, but we have a lot of people on the show. Mohen Leo, our visual effects supervisor who was on Rogue as well, is a huge part of our show and a really important feature on our show. Mohen and his team know everything. We have a lot of people around the show that are really deep. So if we have a question, we ask it, but it’s kind of an organic system, really. Every now and then, they sneak shit in there that even I didn’t know. I was reading online about the antiquities in Luthen’s gallery, and the provenance of some of those antiquities was news to me. (Laughs.) So it was fantastic that the art department snuck those things in there, but by and large, it’s a collaborative, organic, rolling process.”
Gilroy also explained how COVID-19’s restrictions allowed them to include an additional layer of detail in the Aldhani arc, by cutting down the number of extras they could have:
“Aldhani was originally conceived to have six or seven-thousand people in the valley, but with Covid, my God, you can’t put that many extras together. You can’t get them up the hill, you can’t put them in vans, you can’t do any of those things. Beyond an economic hardship, it was just a physically impossible thing to do. So there’s a problem. The whole thing is written one way. It’s a huge deal. So you think, ‘Oh my God, it’s all ruined. It’s all for shit.’ But what comes out of it is something even better because the answer is actually sadder and more important. It’s just the dead-enders. It’s just the end of the line [for the Dhanis]. It’s a culture that’s being wound down, and then that becomes the dominant thing.”
Make sure to check out the full interview over at The Hollywood Reporter, which contains a lot more interesting insight from the Andor showrunner. We are now heading directly into the final two episodes of the season, which will act as their own block. You can read Miguel’s review of episode 10 here, and look forward to our review of episode 11 next Wednesday! Tony Gilroy himself has written the final two episodes, which are directed by Benjamin Caron.
The second and final season of Andor will begin shooting on November 21st in London.
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.
