The Andor finale is not really the end. The surprise final shot proves that. But in an overall sense, the show blends directly into another Star Wars film—2016’s Rogue One—to seamlessly connect with how Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor helps lead a team of Rebel spies to steal the Death Star’s top secret design plans. Rogue One, in turn, ends just where 1977’s Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope begins, telling the story of how Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker ended up able to use those stolen schematics to pinpoint the planet-killing Death Star’s weak spot.
Everything in the Star Wars universe is connected, although Andor has been heralded by fans and critics alike for expanding the franchise into emotionally complex new territory. Over the course of two seasons, the show that ended Tuesday night was about more than one man. It explored how a vast group of dedicated individuals became caught up in the authoritarian rule of the Empire—some fighting it, some advancing it. But Andor was never concerned with strict good-vs.-evil narratives.
Creator Tony Gilroy delved into the shadows that lurk within the most noble of do-gooders, as well as the buried humanity straining to escape those who have served a brutal autocracy. The Oscar-nominated writer-director of Michael Clayton and frequent screenwriter of the Bourne movies was first brought into the Star Wars universe to help shape Rogue One alongside director Gareth Edwards. At the time, he did not know that he would end up with a decade-long assignment. In our conversation about the Andor finale, he says he once regretted getting entangled in the galaxy far, far away. But now that Andor is complete, it’s clear the sacrifice was worthwhile. Fair warning that spoilers lie ahead.
Vanity Fair: Let’s begin with the show’s final shot—Bix (played by Adria Arjona), Andor’s longtime friend and lover, holding a baby in a field of wheat. She has been absent for a while on the show, and this child is obviously Cassian’s—and the reason she went into hiding. Andor has a kind of unabashed cynicism about human nature, but tell me about why that was the way to draw things to a close.
Tony Gilroy: I mean, hope, right? For all the harshness of the show, and all the rugged ride that so many people have to make along the way, it would be a crime against storytelling and a crime against what I actually believe if I didn’t put some hope at the end of it.
It’s hope Andor himself doesn’t know about. And never will know about, given what we know happens next to him.
It makes it that much more painful.
You don’t state it explicitly, relying on the audience to connect the dots. But Bix leaves him because she knows he wouldn’t be able to dedicate himself so completely to the Rebellion if he knew he had a child, right?
I thought there’d be more difficulty in people understanding why she leaves in episode nine. She’s pregnant when she leaves.
So Cassian has a child. Maybe we’ll see that kid again someday.
I mean, man, you’ve got to put a candle in the window, or it’s just not worth it. I can write pretty hard, but I really do feel that.
Even though he doesn’t know, people in Cassian Andor’s situation wouldn’t give up their lives and their spirits if they didn’t believe they were doing it for some future generation.
Right. So few of us have been really challenged to make these kinds of sacrifices. I had that idea to finish there a long time ago. Part of you worries, Oh my God. Is it too sentimental? Is it going to be cheesy to do it?
Were you on set when that was shot, trying to guide how it played out?
I was actually there. I don’t really spend a lot of time on the set at all, but we were actually there. When Adria comes out with the baby, we were at Pinewood on the Bond stage. My bullshit meter is really always engaged. There’s a constant natural dynamic of me dialing things back, and John Gilroy [his brother, coproducer, and editor] coming in and dialing it up, and me dialing it down. So I was ready to look at that and go, “Oh man, I don’t know…” And it just felt so right. It felt right to see it. It felt right to see her do it.
It’s a beautiful, silent moment, but it conveys a lot. She’s looking to the sky, to the future, sort of a callback to Luke Skywalker’s twin-suns moment in the first Star Wars.
There’s another aspect to it, which is Adria Arjona. In lesser hands, it might’ve been dewy. She brings so much mileage to that moment. That really helped me embrace it in the way I wanted to.
Andor and K-2SO venture off on a mission that we see completed in the opening of Rogue One, but you linger on five women whose stories were integral to this series. One was Arjona’s Bix, but let’s also talk about one of the show’s primary antagonists—Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), the Imperial spyhunter who ends up in the Narkina prison complex, the slave labor facility that we saw Andor trapped in during the first season.
We don’t save a lot of sets. They’re very carnivorous over there. They destroy everything. So I remember telling Luke Hull, the show’s production designer, “Oh man, save a piece of Narkina. Save me a shot of that cell, because I think we’ll probably use it.” I mean, it’s the fitting result of her monkey business, isn’t it, really?
I think it’s a fate worse than death.
It is worse than death. Having been through Narkina, and having written through it and lived through it and sort of inhabited it imaginatively—yeah, it’s worse.
There’s also the insult of it, right? The Empire just…discards her. And it’s using up whatever energy she has left in service of the busywork—making pieces of the Death Star.
From the kinder-block to that, you know? When [Kathryn Hunter’s] Eedy [the intrusive mother of Kyle Soller’s Syril Karn] says, “We know what your childhood is,” she goes, “Well, I was raised in an Imperial kinder-block since I was three years old.” So she is a daughter of the Empire. She is their ultimate product. She is everything. And look how they’ve treated her. Look where she’s ended up.
And she didn’t even do anything wrong, right?
She played too hard. As she says, “I am a scavenger. I had to be a scavenger. I had to do this stuff.”
But she wasn’t a traitor, or even a leaker. She was falsely accused.
Never. No. Never, never, never. And Partagaz [her supervisor, played by Anton Lesser] recognizes that. Partagaz is a pretty good boss, really. He recognizes the things that are tricky about her, but he also recognizes her value in a really fundamental way that Krennic [the weapons supervisor played by Ben Mendelsohn] just doesn’t have time for.
The physical interaction between Krennic and Dedra in that scene when he’s tapping her head so forcefully, so cruelly…
I can’t take any credit for that. I remember watching it on dailies, going like, “What? Oh my God.” That set is from the first time when they bring Syril in to be interrogated in the first season. Dedra and Kyle had their first date in that box, basically. Again, we were like, “Man, let’s hang on to that.”
It’s a nice callback. And his poking at her is so much better than a strike, or some kind of torture. There’s something that’s diminishing about it.
It’s haunted. Yeah, it works.
Another of the women in that wrap-up montage is Mon Mothma, the Rebel leader played by Genevieve O’Reilly.
She’s at the table with her cousin [Vel Sartha, another black-ops spy for the Rebellion, played by Faye Marsay], and they’re there with the troops.
Mon is in the mud. She’s off in the wilderness. But then you follow that with a shot of her husband, Perrin [played by Alastair Mackenzie], riding in the luxury car with the dame beside him, knocked out with her space wine.
Sculdun’s wife, yeah.
Oh, that is Sculdun’s wife, right! [Davo Sculdun was one of the oligarchs who collaborated with the Empire.] I didn’t make that connection until now.
Everyone knows what I think about Perrin from watching the show, I guess. He’s a dick in the beginning. He’s really an asshole, and he’s easy to hate, but that wasn’t what I intended. You find out at the embassy party. What does Davo Sculdun call him? He was a “firebrand” when he was in school.
This is what happens when you compromise that integrity.
He’s a complicated guy. I promised Alastair that we would not leave Perrin where people thought he was a one-dimensional, easy-to-dismiss character. He does have a point of view. He’s a hedonist. There are a lot of sacrifices in this show. All variety of sacrifices. He’s made his sacrifice for hedonism. He doesn’t look happy in that car.
That takes us to Kleya, the undercover Rebel operative played by Elizabeth Dulau. The final batch of Andor episodes leads with flashbacks to her origins as a child, orphaned by the Galactic Civil War and joining forces with Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen Rael to form the first resistance spy ring. They are both cold-blooded characters, but this is surprisingly emotional.
Again, there’s a good version of it and a bad version. And she gives us that Mona Lisa moment at the end where Kleya, who’s been so just adamant that [the Rebel outpost of] Yavin to her is an abomination. It’s everything that they hated, because Luthen was not accepted there. She’s disgusted to go there. And when she wakes up that next morning to look at Yavin, she realizes how much of a contributor, how much of an investor she and Luthen are in Yavin. She’s watching the people there, and just a little moment of pride comes on her face. She just warms up just a little bit and begins to take ownership of the Rebellion. That’s everything to me.
We also see that even as a child, she and Luthen were more equals. He’s a father figure to her, but she pushes him too.
We really find out by the end that she’s been in charge the whole time, since she was six years old. Since the moment he opened that cage, she’s really been the boss. She’s constant, stoic, forward-moving, unyielding, and a passionate zealot.
Most Star Wars fans would never have guessed there was this deep and complicated origin to the Rebellion. We took it for granted that there are good guys and bad guys. I feel like Andor shows how the gears of that conflict are really greased by the blood of these people, these countless unknown who sacrifice everything.
You just wrote the logline for the show. Yeah, I mean, that’s what it is.
Could this similar story be told in another context—the Cold War, for instance? Or is there something unique about Andor because it is set in the Star Wars universe?
That’s the accelerant, and that’s the thing that’s made all this possible, the freedom of imagination—because it’s Star Wars. It liberates you to swing away in ways you might not do if it was real life. A couple of times, I’ve hijacked things that were real-life stories and said, “Let’s make them fictional.” [Star Wars] is a place where I didn’t have to feel as if I was being irresponsible by changing the truth.
I don’t feel that there’s a lecture in Andor, but is there a unifying idea or feeling that you hope will stick with the viewers?
I appreciate the beginning of the question, because I’m not trying to preach to anybody. I’m working on my own shit, I guess. I think I’m more of a moralist than I had anticipated. I don’t have religion in my life, but I think I value community. I think community really means something more to me than I had thought. All the way through the show, what is the Empire doing? They’re destroying communities: families, towns, planets, cities, economies. It’s this acquisitional greed and the cruelty that comes with it.
And I think that is something that I’m worried about and fascinated by.
Isn’t that a throughline in your work outside of this particular universe?
I am just constantly perplexed by people who know they’re doing the wrong thing and do it anyway. I’m fascinated by that. Look, Michael Clayton is essentially that, right? I don’t really understand it. I keep working on it.
For me, Andor is about not just standing up for yourself, but proving your own value by standing up for others, even people you may never even know. But what does collaborating with the Empire get you?
The Empire is just shattering, fragmenting, grabbing, destroying, and taking. And then the people that are doing it on the Imperial side are all isolated. They think they’re part of something, but they’re really not. Look what happens to Dedra. Look what happens to Partagaz [the chief of the Empire’s counterintelligence unit, driven to suicide]. Look what happens to Syril Karn [an Imperial civil servant who dies after becoming a pawn of the Empire]. He tries to believe in the dream. It’s the carelessness and the cruelty and the lack of empathy. That’s what I’m pitching.
The reward Partagaz gets for his service is those few minutes alone, to die by suicide. That’s as much as the Empire allows him after he fails.
Anton Lesser, I mean, that actor is one of the many blessings of making this show. [Casting director] Nina Gold brought in Anton. I think he was the first person I saw for the part. I’m like, “Yeah, let’s have that guy.” And then if you go back and just did a supercut of his scenes, you see not only how great he is, and not only how funny he is, but that dude is carrying so much expositional weight so effortlessly for the writers on this show. If you’ve got to get some story across, Anton will deliver it for you, man.
Earlier this season, when one of his underlings lavishes him with gratitude for a run-of-the-mill assignment, Partagaz utters the immortal phrase “calibrate your enthusiasm.” People have really reacted to that phrase.
Really?
Absolutely. Where did that come from?
Larry David, I think. [Laughs] Curb Your Enthusiasm. I had the line, and then later on I was like, “Well, I don’t know.” It’s a different version of the same thing, isn’t it?
Is there a moment in the show that for you was the coldest, the iciest? You mentioned being concerned about being too sentimental or being too soft at times. But were there moments where you were like, “I don’t know…this might be too dark”?
Too dark… Bringing those raw recruits into Ghorman as cannon fodder, I remember Danny [Gilroy, his brother and fellow writer on Andor] called me up with that idea. [The Empire] gives them up as target practice to start the massacre. It’s a pretty sad idea.
They are just young boys, practically. Clearly, they don’t know they are being marched to their deaths for a publicity stunt. It challenges the viewer to feel sympathy for somebody in the Empire.
Hell yeah.
In that sequence, the Empire essentially stokes a violent reaction from the Ghorman people to justify crushing them and seizing the planet. That’s another important idea for the rebellion-minded: When you believe strongly in something, it’s easy to be led into a trap by that passion. You have to be smart and step carefully when you are engaging in resistance.
That’s happened so many times before. “We need rebels that you can count on to do the wrong thing when you want it.” I mean, that’s happened. It goes back before Caesar. It probably goes back to the first friggin’ campfire. That’s a tried-and-true technique.
Even before she was Lucasfilm’s president, you worked with Kathleen Kennedy for years on the Bourne movies. Everybody is calling Andor the most grown-up Star Wars story told so far. Can you describe her role in this?
Well, she kind of snuck me into this thing.
She trapped you?
[Laughs] Yeah, she kind of seduced me into it. There was a period of time where I really wanted the show to die and I wanted to get out of it. When COVID came, I thought, Oh, thank God. COVID will kill the show, and I won’t have to do it. So there was a long period of time where I was like, I can’t believe she got me into this.
Why did you want it to die?
Because we had scripts going, and I was going to direct a bunch of episodes, and we were in London—we were casting—and I was just absolutely naive about what it would take to make the show. I really did not know what I was doing at all, in terms of the scope of work. So when COVID came, it was like, Oh, you know what? That’s a sign from God, no show. But the irony is that during that spell, we really figured out how to make it. We figured out a system to do it and got enough of a reset and a deep breath.
How did Kennedy help with that?
She has protected the show and protected me and wrangled a team together. When we started challenging Kathy, Kathy just kept saying yes. “Oh, I’m going to put the first scene in a brothel.” “Okay.” “I’m going to have them kill two cops.” “Okay.” “We want the production designer from Chernobyl.” “Okay, good idea.” She backed our play and got everything that we were doing. We’ve been through everything, she and I, on this—all the good and all the bad. There’s no show without her. For all the shit that she takes online, it’s just insane. This show exists because she forced it to happen. What a tough job she has, man.
Has George Lucas seen Andor?
I don’t know. Not even rumorwise. I’ve only spoken to him once, after Rogue One. I spoke to him on the phone. He was congratulating us. But no, I’ve never met him, and I’ve never talked to him about it. I don’t know.
You’ve said your tour in Star Wars is over for now. What’s next for you?
I’m trying to get a movie off with Oscar Isaac, a movie about movie music. It’s set in LA, so I’m following the tax credit thing very carefully. Money’s tight. But it’s a movie that I really want to make. A really interesting, cool idea. And I would be directing. We have everything ready to go. We’re just trying to get to the number, you know?
This interview has been edited and condensed, with some additions for context and clarity.
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The post ‘Andor’ Finale: Creator Tony Gilroy Breaks Down the ‘Star Wars’ Spy Saga’s Gut-Wrenching Ending appeared first on Vanity Fair.
