I had the opportunity to watch the first four episodes of Star Wars: Andor already and I’m mostly impressed by the strong, smart story and character development. This show is unlike any other Star Wars project that I’ve seen, and I dig it! It’s really doing some great stuff! Its much darker, grittier, and more mature than many of the Star Wars projects that have come before.
During a recent interview with Total Film, series creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy shared some details on the series and talked about the opportunity he and the creative team were given, saying:
“The mandate for the show, the brief for it, was really, ‘Let’s try to make some new lanes here, and let’s try to make a new opportunity. If you think about it, there’s a billion, billion creatures living in that galaxy, and there’s a lot of fascinating stories happening everywhere. Why not explore that?
“When you have Lucasfilm and Disney Plus saying they want to do something really, really different, and you keep pushing them and showing them different, and they keep saying yes, it’s pretty exciting.”
It’s great to hear that Lucasfilm and Disney were open to this kind of Star Wars series because it really goes against everything else they’ve been trying to do with the franchise. The series is set five years before the events of Rogue One, and it centers on Diego Luna‘s Cassian Andor and his journey to joining the Rebellion. When talking about exploring Andor in this series, Luna said:
“I had the chance to explore so many layers of the character that a film would not let you do. Here with the long format, we have basically four films. Therefore, there’s a big chance for you to talk about the contradictions that make someone real, that make a character real and touchable.
“It seems in Rogue One that he’s just a lonely man, that he just has a relationship with a droid and that’s it. And now we get to tell the story that is closer to mine or yours, where there’s a family, there’s friends, there are enemies, there are people in your community that are expecting something from you.
“In Rogue One, he’s just on a mission, and nothing is going to get between him and the mission. Here he has the chance to be real, to make mistakes, and to have relations like the one he has with [Adria Arjona’s] Bix that is quite crucial and important. We get to experience his home, we see his mom. It’s a beautiful thing, if you like a character to be able to go back and be so specific and work so much time on it.”
I’m actually enjoying seeing Andor in this different situation, it’s a very different version of the character. While I didn’t find him to be the most interesting character of Rogue One, I am finding him interesting in this series. As for what is to come beyond the four episodes that I’ve seen, Gilroy explains that the scale of the series is just going to get bigger, which is exciting!
“Oh my God, we haven’t even started yet. We’re just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Why? Because I have 1,400 pages of script to deal with and we want to have a really complicated and interconnected story. I don’t think I’ll do this more than once, it’s a one time, five year opportunity. So we’re going to go all in, and I’m going to try to explore every single aspect of the revolution from the ground up – what happens to ordinary people when there’s a life-changing war coming, when there’s a rebellion coming. You’ve only seen us getting started. We’re just getting started.”
Well, I’m hooked on the series and I’m buckled in and ready to take the adventurous ride that Gilroy wants to take us on!