[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Andor” Season 2, Episodes 1-3.]
When Tony Gilroy decided that each block of “Andor” Season 2 episodes would take place a year apart, he knew those blocks had to cover “the most intense three days” of each given year. That started with the wedding, the “defining clock” for Episodes 1-3.
“Mon Mothma is just absolutely upended — and my God, is Cassian going to get back in time to save everybody from the Mina Rau? And I’ve got Eedy coming for lunch,” Gilroy said with a chuckle in a conversation with IndieWire. “On paper, everyone was like, really? But… her arrival at lunch is as heavy as any of those other things.”
Yes, as intense as things are with Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), we simply cannot move on without addressing the new dynamic between Dedra (Denise Gough) and Syril (Kyle Soller). In Season 1, the two empire fanatics were separated as they closed in on Cassian (Diego Luna) and the rebels, only coming face-to-face in the final episodes (so close, in fact, that a certain critic I know whispered “kiss” during the Season 1 finale).
Season 2 catches up with the fascist lovebirds not only in a relationship, but living together, a storyline that tilts into comedy when Syril’s mother (Kathryn Hunter) comes to visit. Episodes 1-3 were directed by Ariel Kleiman, whom Gilroy called a “beautiful director” and praised for Syril’s neurotic lunch prep. Composer Brandon Roberts added to the farce with a “1960s sitcom cue” that the showrunner called “inspired.”
“Once you see them together, it was delicious to write,” he said. “The Empire, for her, it’s a god. For him, it’s a place of safety — but he’s a romantic. He’s a fantasist, and he’s got a very loud, imaginative internal conversation inside his head … you probably know relationships like that, where two people sort of want the same thing, and as long as the their reasons for it are not tested, everything will be OK.”
Gough was initially against any romance for Dedra, lest it overtake the rest of her arc, but the character is very much intact in the Season 2 premiere. She’s still a hardworking space Nazi girlboss, and those who longed to see her share screen time with Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) were quickly rewarded in a scene that’s “lighting the fuse on what will be a really integral part of the whole story.”
That fuse is Ghorman, a piece of peripheral Star Wars lore that will be central to “Andor” Season 2 — and is introduced chillingly in this week’s episodes. As a history buff, Gilroy shared his fascination with the Wannsee Conference of 1942, where the Nazis “basically had a PowerPoint luncheon to decide how to kill six million people.”
“It’s so in the temperature of our show … to use propaganda over a long period of time to destroy a culture,” he said. “One of the things that the propagandists will use is the insularity of the community, the pride of the community … take that and use it as a weapon against them, and watch that turn and see how effective the propaganda can be to curdle that concept.”
“The concept of media, controlling media, and the way power controls media and weaponizes media … if you have the opportunity to do a 1,500-page story about revolution and oppression and insurrection, it would really be a shame if you didn’t get that note of the court in there somewhere.”
“Andor” Season 2, Episodes 1-3 are now streaming on Disney+.
