The first season of Star Wars: Andor has yet to air, but showrunner Tony Gilroy is drawing back the curtain about where the series begins and what legacy characters may have some unexpected moments for long-time fans of the franchise.
A warning before I go on: below are very mild spoilers for the beginning of Andor. If you want to go into the show without knowing anything about the story or the characters, stop reading now!
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Gilroy shared some details about Andor, including that Alan Tudyk as K-2SO will sadly not be in season one (though there’s a good chance we’ll see him in season two).
The two seasons, for Gilroy, are actually two parts of a whole: “This first season is about [Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor] becoming a revolutionary, and the second 12 episodes take him into Rogue One,” he explained.
And where does the show start with Cassian’s path toward becoming a rebel spymaster? “His adopted home will become the base of our whole first season, and we watch that place become radicalized,” he said. “Then we see another planet that’s completely taken apart in a colonial kind of way. The Empire is expanding rapidly. They’re wiping out anybody who’s in their way.”
And then there’s Mon Mothma, a Star Wars character that may be unfamiliar to some. The character was first introduced in Return of the Jedi as a leader of the Rebellion. Caroline Blakiston played her then, but Genevieve O’Reilly played the character in the prequels and in Rogue One: O’Reilly is back for Andor, and Mon Mothma will be more than a bit part.
“It is a huge, orchestral, Dickensian ensemble cast, with Diego at the middle of it, and Genevieve at the middle of another part of it,” Gilroy explained. “They intersect. I’m not going to get into how they intersect. They do have intersection—but they do not meet. They will not meet until the second half.”
Gilroy also teased that we might not have the right picture about certain legacy characters like Mon Mothma.
“There are certain people, characters, that are legacy characters, that the audience, the passionate audience, really feels that they have an understanding of and know,” Gilroy said. “In some cases, they’re right. And in some cases, what we’re saying is, ‘What you know, what you’ve been told, what’s on Wookieepedia, what you’ve been telling each other…is really all wrong.’”
You can check out the Vanity Fair article in its entirety here. And we’ll find out what characters we’ve got all wrong when the first season of Andor premieres on Disney+ in late summer 2022. No news yet on when season two will hit the streaming platform.
