During the first season of Lucasfilm’s lavish “Star Wars” series “Andor,” creator Tony Gilroy traveled to Scotland during production. In the back of a “sweet little hotel,” he met with Diego Luna, who played the title character, a thief who becomes radicalized to the growing Rebellion and plays a key role in the downfall of the Empire’s first Death Star, as depicted in 2016’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” Gilroy and Luna, along with Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy, had mapped out an ambitious five-season arc that would detail Cassian Andor’s journey. But when it was time to think about Season 2, they had second thoughts.
“We just faced each other and said, ‘What the f—?’” Gilroy explained. “Physically, you couldn’t do it.” They also questioned who would pay for five seasons of an incredibly expensive, intricately designed and carefully plotted space opera, which some critics have deemed the franchise’s greatest entry since the original 1977 “Star Wars.” “It was just impossible. The amount of work that went into these two seasons is…You couldn’t do five,” Gilroy said.
So the creator and EP hatched a different plan: Every three episodes of the show’s second season would jump forward in time by a year, as if the show were zooming through hyperspace. The final cluster of episodes would end right before the events of “Rogue One.” “We came back to them and said, ‘Hey, we’ll do a second season where we do all four years in one season,’” Gilroy said. “And they were like, ‘OK, we’ll go for that.’”
Gilroy said that the hardest aspect of this approach was convincing the studio that it would work “without doing all the corny exposition that would normally be attendant with that.” To prove that they could pull it off, Gilroy created a proof of concept: “I wrote the top and the tail of each block to set the frame for each year. And I took that into the writers’ room so nobody could tell me that it wouldn’t work. And then we filled in from there.”
The new structure galvanized the “Andor” team. “It’s very exciting as a writer,” Gilroy said. “And it’s exciting for the actors, too. We kept waiting for it to fail, going, ‘There must be something that’s going to bite us here.’ We kept waiting for a bugaboo that never appeared.”
While the show is now officially over, there are undoubtedly elements that will be explored in ancillary media — comic books, video games and the like. For his part, Gilroy is content with his time in a galaxy far, far away and no longer sees himself as the gatekeeper of this particular piece of “Star Wars” mythology. “I paid rigorous attention to the canon that I’m supposed to pay attention to. I’ve ignored the canon that I’m allowed to ignore,” he said. “I don’t own the IP, so they can do what they want.”
When we asked how closely “Andor” Season 2 resembled what he initially set out to make, even Gilroy wasn’t sure. “You spend so much time constructing and tearing down in your imagination. It’s just such a constant process,” he said. Some scenes stayed the same throughout, including a final confrontation between Denise Gough’s Imperial officer and Stellan Skarsgård’s Rebel operative, as well as another where Andor encounters a Force healer. Others went through endless iterations.
The final scene, with a main character looking off into the distance, at once heartbreaking and optimistic, was one Gilroy had dreamed up early in the show’s development. “I wanted to be able to not feel like a sadist with what I was doing with these characters and have some hope,” he said. “Legit hope. Not cheesy T-shirt hope, but real hope.”
This story first ran in the Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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