Mon Mothma’s musical breakdown has become an unexpected anthem far, far away from the world of Andor. People on our own planet are imitating it, parodying it, and drawing on it as a source of catharsis for fraught times.
In the now-infamous scene from season two of the critically acclaimed Star Wars series, Genevieve O’Reilly’s galactic senator dances away the pain after she tacitly agrees to the murder of a lifelong friend who has become a liability to the secret uprising she’s been guiding. Tay Korma (played by Ben Miles) was an ally, one of the supposed good guys—but after he expresses dissatisfaction with their covert partnership, a militant member of the Rebellion decides he has to go for the sake of the greater good.
But is “good” really what this is? Mon Mothma drowns out that agonizing question as she twirls mindlessly to the pulse-pounding dance number. “It’s dancing to stop from screaming,” showrunner Tony Gilroy says.
Fans of Andor are now recording videos of themselves spiraling out to the tune. Someone added it to footage of Elon Musk rocking his head and gazing around the Oval Office at a recent White House press conference. Others have removed the music from the Andor scene entirely and edited in various pop songs to accompany Mon Mothma’s moves. You can find her spinning to everything from Florence and the Machine to Dolly Parton, Kylie Minogue, and Miley Cyrus.
“It’s absolutely a loving tribute. It is just what Star Wars fans do—taking something and making it their own and making it funny,” says Alex Damon, who runs the YouTube channel Star Wars Explained with his wife Mollie. He thinks Mon Mothma’s emotional meltdown is bizarrely relatable: “Part of the reason it grabbed people’s imaginations, and part of the reason they probably want to put their own music onto it, is because, ‘Yeah, I’ve probably crashed out to this exact song.’”
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Rather than dispatching a fleet of copyright takedowns, Lucasfilm has embraced the remixes and homages. The company uploaded an hour-long marathon of Mothma’s dance to YouTube, which is now closing in on nearly a million views. On Friday, Lucasfilm also released the theme—titled “Niamos! (Chandrilian Club Mix)”—as a stand-alone single on Apple Music and Spotify.
This lighthearted development is an unexpected turn for a notoriously foreboding series. Gilroy used the trappings of Star Wars to craft what critics have hailed as the most mature and sober-minded story to ever emerge from that universe—a meditation on the moral cost of sacrificing not just lives but sometimes souls in service to a noble cause. So, how does he feel about letting people play with it for laughs?
“I love it. Why not? It’s fun,” Gilroy says. “You’d have to be wrapped pretty tight to not want to do that.”
The New York native recently became aware of what was happening while traveling around Los Angeles for a series of For Your Consideration screenings and Q&As for Andor, which is hoping to turn its critical acclaim into Emmy nominations.
“They showed me the TikToks when I was out there. I was like, ‘Holy cow,’” he says. “The first one someone sent me was of a woman DJ, and it’s bright and sunny. There’s a guy who’s got short shorts on, and a rainbow blanket, and he’s dancing. Then I showed that to somebody, and they go, ‘Oh my God. There’s nine more….’”
Gilroy began encouraging Lucasfilm to make it easier for fans to remix the song by offering up the separate audio components of the track. “I’m hoping that they’re working out the legality of getting the stems out to, if not everybody, at least a certain number of DJs who they approve of, who can mess with it,” he says. “It really could be a gas.”
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“A gas” is not what this wedding scene originally represented. Gilroy intended it to underscore Mon Mothma’s desperation and isolation, even as she operates in public as a powerful political leader and socialite.
“The only people who know what she’s going through are her and you in your living room. There are hundreds of people in that ballroom—nobody else has any clue what’s happening,” Gilroy says. “It binds you to her, in a way. You’ve been through something together that no one else has seen.”
To the onlookers at that galactic wedding, her dance just looks like exuberance. “They think, ‘Oh, that’s the mother of the bride, and she’s having a great day. Too much to drink. Isn’t that fun? Let’s party on!’” Gilroy says. “And that is so not what’s happening.”
Mon Mothma is actually pre-grieving. The friend she knows will be killed is alive—but not for long. She could stop his murder, but deep down she knows she has to allow it. Tay Kolma was a banker and childhood friend who helped her hide funds for the underground Rebellion. But when he hints at blackmail to recoup his personal financial losses, the only permanent solution is the unspeakable.
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Gilroy made the unusual choice of not showing the character’s actual murder, to better reflect how Mothma would experience his disappearance. When Kolma leaves the party, his regular driver has been replaced by someone Andor viewers recognize as the Rebel assassin Cinta Kaz (Varada Sethu).
“She does not know exactly how it’s going to happen,” Gilroy says. “They can’t find a body. He just never shows up again.”
That also gives her slight deniability to rationalize what happened. “He went to the farm upstate,” Gilroy jokes.
The origins of “Niamos! (Chandrilan Club Mix)” go back to the first season of Andor. Composer Nicholas Britell, best known for the theme to Succession, featured it as a piece of background music in a sequence when Diego Luna’s title character visits an intergalactic beachside resort. The name of this planet gave the track its name. (The remix subtitle comes from Chandrila, Mon Mothma’s homeworld.)
Star Wars obsessives fixated on the upbeat number, mesmerized by the notion of an actual pop song from within the Star Wars universe. Then the theme resurfaced in the wedding scene from episode three of the second season, and finally broke through to the mainstream. “When it came back, I remember shouting out ‘Niamos!’ and then they actually shout it in the song,” Damon says. “The song is already such a banger that I think people were excited to hear it again. But then it’s also this happy song playing over such a tense and sad moment. I think the juxtaposition of that caught a lot of fans’ eyes.”
The wedding version of the song is significantly reworked from the original by season two’s composer Brandon Roberts, who won an Emmy for cowriting the score to the 2018 mountain-climbing documentary Free Solo. “It’s just about adding new elements that you think hype it up, everything from percussion to synthesized elements to changing the actual balance of things,” Roberts tells Vanity Fair.
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During the making of the original 1977 Star Wars film, George Lucas was notorious for giving actors this direction: “Faster, more intensity.” That’s pretty much what Gilroy wanted Roberts to do to this update of the “Niamos” theme.
“I was like, ‘Dude, I’m going to the wedding, and I want to do a crescendo action sequence. Everything’s going to come to a head. I’d like to play that all against the ‘Niamos’ theme,’” Gilroy says. “And we listened to it again, and it’s like, Okay, it works, but it really needs to be jacked up. It really needs to be muscled up and remixed.”
He gave Roberts a selection of EDM songs for comparison and asked him to try to match those vibes. “It was just about giving that piece as much energy as possible. The fortunate repercussion is the whole thing feels more frenetic,” Roberts says.
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Britell declined to participate in this story, but Roberts praised the feel of his original composition for seeming both authentic—like something denizens of another galaxy would actually listen to and enjoy—and also alien to our own world. The song was created entirely through synthesizers, but a single lilting melody throughout has the feel of a theremin, a mainstay instrument for eerie sci-fi music of the 1950s.
“That electronic lead line, that’s Nick, and it’s always wobbling in and out of tune, which does give that feel of a theremin,” Roberts says. “You have to bend because it’s a continuous sound, right? It’s slightly uncanny.”
Roberts also seems to support releasing the elemental stems of the “Chandrilian Club Mix” to the public, completing the handoff of “Niamos!” from Britell to him to the Star Wars fandom at large. “It’s always interesting to see what people do, but I think the most interesting thing would be to see what people do from scratch but using the musical material,” he says. “I bet there’s going to be some very cool versions of it out there, much hipper than anything I could do.”
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In a sense, it’s similar to what Lucas did with Star Wars toys during the original trilogy. The action figures became a gateway for kids to create their own galactic stories, and the grown-up version of that is giving content creators the tools to make their own music and videos.
“We pass them around amongst ourselves,” Gilroy says. “Denise Gough will send me something. ‘Did you see this?’ And I’ll send it to Adria [Arjona]. I’m sure I don’t see them all, but the ones I see are pretty amusing.”
Apart from Emmy ambitions, Gilroy has one other wish for the season ahead. “Are you going to any weddings this summer?” he asks. “I have one wedding to go to. I’m really hoping that ‘Niamos!’ will show up on the mix.”
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