A YouTube livestream event on Tuesday, featuring Andor creator/writer/showrunner Tony Gilroy and star Diego Luna, along with various stars of the series, inevitably touched on one of the entire series’ most devastating moments. One of the show’s running villains, civil servant and general catspaw Syril Karn, has a key confrontation in episode 8. Addressing the character’s storyline alongside Luna and Syril actor Kyle Soller, Gilroy revealed that the sequence’s climax was one of his biggest battles on the show.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the Andor season 2 episode “Who Are You?”]
In “Who Are You?”, Syril finally comes face-to-face with Cassian Andor (Luna), the rebel he’s been obsessed with since the beginning of the show. That obsession destroyed his career, took him across the galaxy, and led him to a satisfying, complicated new life. But he realizes it was all a lie, and that he was used to help the Empire mass-murder the people of the planet Ghorman. In the midst of the Imperial massacre on Ghorman, cleverly planned and constructed by Syril’s lover Dedra (Denise Gough) with his unwitting help, Syril happens across Cassian — and attacks him.
And Cassian, who had no idea he’d become such a focus of Syril’s life, asks “Who are you?” Syril is clearly devastated. And a minute later, without ever getting to answer Cassian, he’s dead. The two men remain mysteries to each other, and Cassian moves on.
“That line was very difficult to say!” Luna says in the livestream, talking about how much he had to put aside all his feelings about Syril’s history and his own knowledge of the larger story in order to make the moment work. “I think it was very smart also.”
“I had to really fight for that line,” Gilroy says. “There was a lot of controversy about that.”
Luna says Gilroy called him the night before shooting that scene to emphasize the importance of getting the line right, due to that fight to keep it in the script. They debated shooting alternate versions of the meeting, but Luna recounts Gilroy saying “It’s that one. You have to understand, it’s that one.”
Luna says when he actually got to the line during shooting, “The moment when we said it, and that kind of ‘Oh shit!’ — the whole scene turns 360 in that moment.”
“I told them, I’m naming the episode ‘Who Are You?’” Gilroy said. “I pushed all my chips on that. There were a lot of phone calls about that… I was very clear, [though] there was a lot of noise.” Because of the pushback, Gilroy says he did shoot alternate versions of the confrontation, in spite of his objections: “Whaddya do? You get alts. But, like, sometimes the building of alts diminishes the one [version] that you want. So you get half a slice of the thing that you want. My call to him was like, ‘You can get all the alts you want, but I know what I’m going [with] when I get in the cutting room. […] So make sure you get a good one, because I’m not going to look at the other ones.”
For his part, Soller cites the line “Who are you?” as “the death blow” for Syril. “That line is so cutting. Everything Syril experiences in the 10 minutes leading up to that is kind of crushing, but that is the ultimate death blow for him. The guy whom he’s been funneling all of this energy toward for the past couple of years just doesn’t even know he exists. Brutal. Brutal.”
One fun reveal from later in the livestream, though, is that Gilroy also had to battle for a much smaller and less telling detail in the show. In the season 2 episode “What a Festive Evening,” Cassian’s fellow rebel Bix (Adria Arjona) confronts her torturer, Imperial scientist Doctor Gorst (Joshua James). He’s first seen entering his torture lab carrying a fancy cupcake in a decorative package, which he sets down on a computer panel right before Bix reveals herself.
“I had to fight for that cupcake, too,” Gilroy laughs. “I don’t know, I just wanted it! But nobody [else] wanted it.”
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