Posted in: Disney+, Star Wars, TV | Tagged: andor, star wars, tony gilroy

Andor Creator Can't See Himself Doing Something This Ambitious Again

Andor creator Tony Gilroy on the creative process and dramatic changes involved in condensing five years of story down into two seasons.

Just as Gareth Edwards' Rogue One aligned itself in sync with 1977's A New Hope, Tony Gilroy sought to do the same, connecting Andor to the 2016 film. The series follows Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), who was the co-protagonist of Rogue One, who gets recruited into the Rebel Alliance initially as a mercenary before embracing their cause. What was supposed to be a five-season journey turned into a two-season one, but Gilroy spent years piecing the series together cohesively as a passion project. He spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about how the 22-time-Emmy-nominated series came to be, condensing five years' worth of story into two seasons, and if he sees himself doing anything this ambitious again.

Andor Creator Tony Gilroy on Crafting Star Wars Political Action Thriller

Regarding Andor's initial plans, "I've known [Lucasfilm president] Kathy Kennedy for years. After 'Rogue,' she had an appetite to do a prequel around the five years of Cassian Andor before the film. She knew that I knew the character really well, and asked me to look at two different versions that they had," Gilroy said. "One was cool and slick, but it seemed to me that it was going to run out of road quickly, so I wrote a long email to her, sort of a manic manifesto, about how I thought the show should be built. She was like, 'This is pretty mad and undoable, but I see what you're saying about what we're doing now.' They tried it again, and then they came back to me and said, 'We looked at this memo from a year and a half ago, and it makes a lot more sense to us now. Do you want to do that?'"

When it came to filming the series, things couldn't get any worse on set as the world was dealing with a pandemic. "I had no clue what I was stepping into. I'd been on 'House of Cards' for a couple of years as a consultant for Beau [Willimon]. I've made some big movies. But my naivete and idiocy about what this was going to take was staggering to me just six months later. I was going to try to direct, rewrite all the scripts, to do all this stuff — it was ridiculous. Then COVID came," Gilroy said. "The only thing I saw positively about COVID was that it would kill the show, I thought."

He continued, "But eventually they started to build back up. It was obvious I couldn't go back to London [where the show was to shoot], so we were going to have to get British directors. I wouldn't be able to direct, but I would be able to keep writing and run the show. I got into rewriting the scripts and figured out how to run the show from here. By the time dailies started to come in, I was getting very excited about what we were doing. When I got out of quarantine, I went over there [to the U.K.], trying to come up with what we were going to do going forward. By then, we knew what the scope of the work was, and Diego Luna and I sat down, and it wasn't a 'choice,' even; we simply would not be able to make a show like this in the way we initially planned. It would go on too long. He'd be too old. People would die. But the solve presented itself very elegantly: the structure that we ended up with the second season."

On whether Gilroy ever sees himself doing anything like Andor again, "I could see doing a limited series or something, but I can't see doing anything like this again. For five and a half years, every single day of my life, I had a maximally imaginative involvement that was never complete — writing, designing, music, casting, all of it," he said. "Every demand on your imagination that could ever be asked was screaming for your attention. That's a pretty heady place to live. I grew to love it. But I can't imagine that I would ever be that fully engaged again."

You can check out the complete interview for more, including the series' political overtones. Andor, which also stars Kyle Soller, Adria Arjona, Genevieve O'Reilly, Stellan Skarsgård, Denise Gough, Faye Marsay, Varada Sethu, Elizabeth Dulau, Ben Mendelsohn, Benjamin Bratt, Fiona Shaw, and features the voice of Alan Tudyk, is available on Disney+.

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