Andor creator: 'We try to be more serious about Star Wars – we shot a cop in the face in the opening scene'

“I said to Disney, ‘You’ve made all these films about one group of people.’ There are billions of creatures in the galaxy and most have never heard of Jedis or the Force. Let’s get out of the front of the restaurant and go into the kitchen. That’s where I’ll be.”

George Lucas’s Star Wars is, at heart, a space opera for children; morality tales about light versus dark, good versus evil. But Andor is something different. Indeed, there are no Skywalkers here. No lightsabers. No cute little Ewoks or Baby Yodas. In fact, the series – which has become the most critically acclaimed Star Wars story of the past decade – hardly feels like Star Wars at all.

Instead, it’s a moody spy thriller in the mould of John le Carré, set during the height of the Galactic Empire, told in the serious, sophisticated style of prestige television. It doesn’t exactly scream “Disney”.

“I mean, my God,” says Gilroy, “in series one we shoot a cop in the face in the opening scene – outside a brothel!” Andor is something extraordinary – Star Wars for adults.

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Ask a fan of the show what it’s about, and they might tell you different things. The scrappy rise of the Rebel Alliance. The suffocating oppression of the Empire. But primarily, it’s about Cassian Andor – played by Mexican actor Diego Luna – who was first introduced in 2016 Star Wars spin-off movie Rogue One.

That film told the story of how seasoned spy Andor sacrificed himself to steal the plans for the Death Star; the planet-destroying superweapon introduced in 1977’s original Star Wars movie (and later blown up by Luke Skywalker).

Andor rewinds the timeline back a further five years. It is, in the words of Luna, a chronicle of how a “cynical, individualistic” thief became a revolutionary hero. “A lot has to happen before he becomes that man,” he says.

When it debuted in 2022, Andor did not arrive amid optimism or fanfare. It was a spin-off of a spin-off, a prequel to a prequel, an origin story about a character few people cared about. As viewers soon realised, however, what set it apart from other Disney Star Wars projects was that – to quote Gilroy – it “tries very rigorously to be more serious about this s**t than anybody ever has been”.

George Lucas’s original Star Wars films were not without their own seriousness, of course. The Rebels in the first Star Wars movie in 1977 were based on the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. The 1999–2005 prequel trilogy follows the death of democracy.

Yet Gilroy was interested in specifics, in taking the more operatic concepts of Star Wars and considering how they would work in reality. For example: where did the Rebel Alliance get the money to afford their weapons and spaceships?

The first half of season one follows Andor as he is recruited by a mysterious man named Luthen Rael – a grizzled rebel spymaster played by Stellan Skarsgard – to pull off the daring heist of a fortified Imperial vault.

Like much of Andor, the heist was inspired by real revolutionary history, specifically, Joseph Stalin’s 1907 robbery of a Georgian bank, the proceeds of which helped finance the Russian Revolution.

“I’m an autodidactic, dinner-table history idiot,” says Gilroy. “The French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution – Andor is like a catalogue of a couple of thousand years of repetitive cruelty and oppression.”

Now, for Andor’s 12-episode second series (which takes place over four years), Gilroy dives deeper into the psychology of rebellion, exploring what it would take for the once-selfish Andor to become someone who would die for the cause. “In Rogue One he has a speech saying he couldn’t face himself if he didn’t give everything,” explains Luna. “For him to understand that line, he has to witness a lot of darkness.”

Darkness, of course, isn’t just the preserve of the villains. There’s a scene in Andor’s new series in which Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic, the director of the Death Star project, rolls his eyes at a dissenter and sneers, “My rebel is your terrorist, something like that?” It’s a line that encapsulates one of Andor’s more challenging themes – the moral complexities of resistance, and the ruthlessness required to topple a regime.

“It takes the courage of people to resist empire,” says Irish actress Genevieve O’Reilly, who reprises her role as senator Mon Mothma, the future leader of the Rebellion. “History decides who we call heroes and who we don’t.”

The respectable Mothma spends much of Andor politicking in the elite circles of the galaxy. But the Rebellion is built on the dirty work of the ruthless Luthen Rael, whose pragmatic methods include bombings and assassinations. “I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them,” he growls in the first series. “I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.”

“There’s a great variety of opinion within rebellion,” says Gilroy. “What happens if you go violent? What happens if you don’t? What constitutes the proper rules of engagement for resistance? If you’re going to do an honest show about this topic, you have to be able to confront all the colours of it.”

Multibillion-dollar, family-friendly entertainment corporations don’t tend to be fans of violent revolutionaries. But Gilroy insists that Disney have been nothing but supportive of Andor’s approach. “I don’t have a Game of Thrones toolbox with violence and sex,” he says, “but I’ve never had any ideological pushback.”

A request he did receive was to “change one line” in a speech delivered by Andor’s mother, Maarva, played by Fiona Shaw, at the end of series one. As the speech reaches its crescendo, she cries out “Fight the Empire!” – a watering down of the original line, “F**k the Empire!”

“I can understand why,” says Gilroy drily.

The Empire itself is drawn with complexity. One of the show’s most fascinating characters is Dedra Meero, a sour-faced officer who works for the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB), essentially the Empire’s Gestapo.

“She’s one of the most complex women I’ve played,” says Olivier Award-winning Irish actor Denise Gough, who found herself unconsciously admiring Meero’s competent zeal for tracking down rebels. “Is she a psychopath? A cult member? Is she just following orders? In series one, I kept thinking, ‘She’s so excellent at her job!’ But, you know, she is a fascist…”

George Lucas originally took inspiration from Nazi Germany for the aesthetics of the Empire. Hence, “stormtroopers”. Yet, while Star Wars has traditionally painted the Empire in broad strokes of cartoonish evil, Andor reimagines it as something more ordinary: a vast totalitarian system full of petty office politics and soul-crushing bureaucracy. “The ISB is like Veep or The Thick of It,” says Gough, “with people bitching at each other and everyone getting annoyed.”

This banality of evil is typified by a major plotline in season two, in which Dedra Meero attends an ostensibly mundane meeting about the most effective way to turn public opinion against Ghorman, a planet the Empire wants to ravage for resources. The ambitious Meero senses a career opportunity.

“My view of the Empire is that it’s human beings in an institution,” says Gilroy, who drew upon the themes of his George Clooney-starring legal thriller Michael Clayton. “There might be a bunch of true believers. But a lot of people are more worried about getting a promotion. I’m fascinated by people who exile themselves from what they truly believe in order to live.”

Some real-life parallels cut even closer. Beyond the Nazi comparison, in 2018 Star Wars creator George Lucas told fellow director James Cameron that the “big, highly technical Empire” was also meant to resemble the imperial might of 1970s America – especially its prosecution of the Vietnam War.

Andor, arguably the most political Star Wars project to date, finds itself airing during a similarly febrile time. In 2022, Fiona Shaw described Andor as a “scurrilous” reaction to the rising authoritarianism of a “Trumpian world”. By contrast, Tony Gilroy – and much of the cast – are reluctant to entangle the show with current events.

“It felt that way when the first season came out,” says Diego Luna, carefully. “[As humans] we tend to repeat ourselves. We need reminding what our responsibilities are as citizens, as a community. It’s always relevant.”

“We started the show years ago,” adds Gilroy, who is keen that Andor is not perceived purely as a comment on modern politics. “We don’t look at a newspaper while we’re writing. And that’s not just me being safe and cynical. The show speaks for itself. And what the show has to say is taking place in the galaxy. Any similarity with what’s happening [in the real world] is sadly a repetitive cycle that’s been happening all through history.

“We all think that we live in some special time,” he says, firmly. “But just pick up a history book, open a page, and put yourself in there.”

Andor is available to stream on Disney Plus – season 2 arrives on Wednesday 23rd April 2025.

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