Confronting an authoritarian strongman about his war crimes, Mon Mothma’s address to the Galactic Senate sees the future leader of the Rebel Alliance throw down the gauntlet against Emperor Palpatine. But drafting the rousing climax of her political evolution left Dan Gilroy, the writer of “Andor’s” Emmy-nominated episode “Welcome to the Rebellion,” with a daunting task: “This is a wildly historic speech in the ‘Star Wars’ canon, so there was always an imperative of anybody who touched it that this really needed a tremendous amount of thought and care.” Gilroy recently joined The Envelope via Zoom to annotate the four-minute oration.
“The speech that Mon’s giving here has two audiences,” Gilroy says. “The first group are these craven elected officials who have abandoned their posts and left their constituents at the complete mercy of evil. She’s condemning them. The second group she’s speaking to are the galaxy’s infinitely diverse inhabitants. Because Mon understands that the goal of unbridled authority is to make people feel helpless. To break them, to make them believe that resistance is something futile without chance of success.”
Measuring just 269 words — three shorter than the Gettysburg Address — and featuring this allusion to the 16th president’s first inaugural, Mon’s speech draws inspiration from Abraham Lincoln as well as President Kennedy, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, Gilroy says. “Those speeches just have a ring to them. They have a gravitas to them, they have a wisdom to them, they have timeless sense of theme to them.”
“When you’re looking at Mon, and I know [actor] Genevieve [O’Reilly] believes this deeply, you’re looking at somebody who’s overcome their human frailty and their primal desire to survive,” Gilroy says. “She is an apostle of sorts. She has reached a point where her time has come. Fate’s knocked on the door; she doesn’t know if she’s going to get out of this alive, but she’s going to transmit to the world what she believes.”
Gilroy points to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ minister of propaganda, as a real-life analogue to those in Emperor Palpatine’s employ who are devoted to manipulating the truth. “It’s almost like mass hypnosis,” Gilroy says. “They’re putting you to sleep. They’re lying to you with bigger and bigger and bigger lies, and you stop sort of paying attention. So Mon’s trying to wake people up from that lethargy that’s been created by this dictatorship.”
Mon’s intake of breath before the speech reaches its crescendo is purposeful, Gilroy says: “She needs to come in and communicate in a modulated way. It takes tremendous effort. Genevieve really displayed that — she’s almost trembling at first, to control herself. … The bravery really builds, the bravery really climaxes, and the bravery is defined.”
“Andor,” on which Dan collaborated with brothers Tony and John, reflects Gilroy family history. Their father, who was among the troops who liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany in 1945, taught his sons that such crimes against humanity are not to be forgotten, whitewashed or ignored.
Comparing this moment in the speech to “accusing Hitler of genocide in the Reichstag,” Gilroy suggests the term remains contentious to the present day because authoritarian regimes “will vehemently and violently combat anyone trying to say what they’re doing is anything other than righteous”: “Mon knows that this word is radioactive. And for her to use it, she is signing her death warrant. If they catch her, she will be executed for that word.”
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