‘Andor’: Diego Luna on the Series’ Patient Writing and How Disney and Lucasfilm Allowed Them To Go Bold
The second season of Andor is currently in mid-production in the UK, with four months of filming left, but The Hollywood Reporter caught up with star Diego Luna to look back at the first season and his experience with the show, now that it’s been a few months since it finished airing.
One of the things that we learned going into the first season is that showrunner Tony Gilroy originally intended to make five seasons of the series, each one of them covering one year leading up to Rogue One. Plans were changed once they realized it would take them over a decade to produce all of them, and therefore decided to compress the arcs of each of the last four seasons into three-episode arcs that we are now getting in the second season. Luna told The Hollywood Reporter that he’s still glad they made that decision, if for no other reason than he would be doubling his character’s age in the show by the time they got to the end:
“We managed to make the series we made because we took the time we took. The thought of making five seasons, I would probably be 54 and still doing this. So it’d be impossible to pretend to be the guy before Rogue One for such a long time, and to be honest, it’s such an intense journey. It’s fantastic, but it’s so intense. And so it’s great to know that we can give everything to it, and by the end, still have something else to give to other projects and to life.”
Luna and Gilroy have always described Rogue One as the season finale of Andor, as opposed to the series being a prequel to the film. According to Luna, this allows him to find some freedom in what he can bring to the series by knowing where he must end up, rather than looking back at the film and wishing he’d done things differently:
“I remind myself all the time of where the character ends up and what choices I made, because that gives structure to everything I’m doing now. So I’m starting the other way around. It’s less, ‘Oh, I wish,’ and it’s more like, ‘Okay, because I get there, I can do this.’ So that is where I found freedom and all the different ways I can get there. And then I’ll think about what is the most unpredictable one. So, all the layers we didn’t get to see in the film, I get to explore them now. If I had tried them at the time, then I wouldn’t be able to explore them now. So it’s just a perspective kind of thing. The freedom comes from knowing exactly what he does.”
Season one had a chilling reveal in the form of a post-credits scene, when we learned that Cassian Andor was building parts of the Death Star during his imprisonment in Narkina 5, meaning he was part of the workforce that assembled the weapon that ultimately killed him. Diego Luna revealed his reaction to learning that early in the process:
“I had time to digest that because I’m also involved as a producer. So I had a chance to see it coming, but it’s one of those ideas that’s just brilliant. It’s also not obvious. He spent a quite long time living the experience of that prison without finding it out, and it allows you to wonder, ‘Holy shit, what are they building? Could this be …?’ One of the many things that the show has is very patient writing. There are great ideas that come with patience. So it’s very mature writing, and that was one of those reveals where you were like, ‘Shit, that’s so smart.'”
For Luna, it’s a “pinch me” moment that has been going on for years. And not because he gets to be in Star Wars, but because he can’t believe they are allowing them to be this bold and mature:
“I always had a feeling that this wasn’t gonna see the light [of day] till it did. (Laughs.) I kept going, ‘This is too perfect. This is working.’ The whole idea, I always thought, ‘That’s impossible.’ Throughout the whole process, we did exactly what we thought was best. We never prioritized anything but the show. The writing took the time it needed to take, and we got the best cast you can have. So everything just kept getting better and better, and I always had the feeling that something had to go wrong. But it didn’t. We had the freedom and the support of Disney and Lucas[film]. We had the confidence of Kathy [Kennedy] behind the show.”
Luna also described the writing process as a true collaboration between Gilroy, the writers, and most of the people involved in the show. A key player in how the world is brought to life is production designer Luke Hull, who helped him envision the world:
“Tony will sit down with the production designer [Luke Hull], and he’ll say, ‘Okay, what is the logic of that room? Where are the windows?’ And then Luke will make a quick drawing for when Tony is writing the scene that happens in that room. Therefore, Luke’s logic is already on the page. So that is something special. Usually, the writing happens somewhere else, and then you have to interpret it and bring it into a grounded situation. Tony makes you a part of the writing from scratch, so you’ll defend that logic all the way to the end. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, but from there, anything is possible.”
The second season is promising to be much more intense and relentless, and we probably shouldn’t get too attached to some of these characters. The scripts were ready way before season one premiered, and they have been keeping a similar production schedule to what they had the first time around.
Cameras started rolling mid-to-late November on Andor season 2, and they will wrap in August, aiming for a release date one year later. They are currently in two locations at the same time — the Winspit Quarry, which served as Saw Gerrera’s base in season one (and will probably do so again, as Forest Whitaker has confirmed his return), and the Greenham Airbase, used in The Force Awakens to film the Resistance Base in D’Qar.
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.
