Tony Gilroy Says Script for ‘Andor’ Season 2 Finale Completed Last Week Prior to WGA Strike
At a recent For Your Consideration (FYC) Emmy event for Andor, Screen Rant attended a Q&A panel with Tony Gilroy and a selection of the cast. Gilroy, never one to mince words, explicitly mentioned the WGA strike and communicated to attendees that he finished the final script for the Andor season 2 finale shortly before the strike began on May 2. Read the full quote below:
“Two days ago, not because of the strike, but because our thing rhymed with the strike, I finished the last script of the twenty-four. We started three and a half years ago. It’ll be five years by the time we’re done to finish.”
That the strike will not have any major impact on Andor season 2’s schedule will come as a relief to fans. However, both Gilroy and Luna have spoken extensively about the on-set collaboration that sometimes leads to real-time script edits and rewrites. As an example, season 1 had last-minute changes in the Aldhani sequence from episodes 5-6 after they realized they couldn’t gather as many extras as they had originally planned due to COVID-19 protocols; in turn, they reworked the scripts to make it seem like only a handful of them had reached the final destination. This type of collaboration will likely no longer be possible during the remainder of the strike as the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain has ordered members working under WGA jurisdiction to stop work.
On the bright side, as Gilroy mentioned above, he and his team have envisioned this story for three and half years at this point, and seemed at the end of season 1 to have a strong understanding of where the story was going leading up to Rogue One. It’s also not like they were just writing the finale from scratch a few weeks ago; Gilroy said last year, prior to the release of season 1, that all 24 scripts would take up 1,500 pages, and he doesn’t strike as the type that would start to roll cameras with uncompleted scripts. It’s likely that he was just giving it a final pass or reworking a few elements in light of changes from episodes prior that might have come up during production.
While limiting collaboration and flexibility is never advantageous to a project, it’s likely that this limitation won’t have a serious impact on the quality of season 2. At this time, Andor is still expected to make the late summer 2024 release date the crew announced during Star Wars Celebration 2023.
Stay tuned for a comprehensive update from Star Wars News Net on what the WGA strike means to future Star Wars projects, especially to the Star Wars film slate, a schedule that is already viewed by some fans as being on shaky ground. In the meantime, we can all breathe a sigh of relief for Andor season 2 (and, now that we are at it, The Acolyte as well, as the Leslye Headland series is scheduled to complete principal photography later this month, so it’s not like they have a lot of time to implement on-set rewrites, strike or not).
When she isn't watching her friends and family's eyes glaze over at the mention of The Clone Wars, she's at the park with her dog, Melvin, or on the couch with a book in one hand and a drink in the other. Physically, she lives in Ohio; spiritually, she lives in Naboo.
