Tony Gilroy is no stranger to the Star Wars universe. He is a credited writer on Rogue One and the creator of its prequel Andor, set immediately five years prior. Tony spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about his vision for Andor.

“The five years beforehand is where everything is fermenting and cooking, and bubbling up, and all these nascent revolutionary, rebellious ideas are percolating all over the galaxy in all kinds of independent, improvised, and ad hoc ways,” says Gilroy.

“What’s potent about revolutionary stories is that they have everything. They have commitment, betrayal, sacrifice, ideas that are challenged, and a decaying or challenged power structure. You have all of the forces of civilization coming down on Joe (or Jane) Citizen,” declares Gilroy. “The difference in Andor is that people are chewed up by galactic events rather than world events. It’s a cauldron,” notes the writer.

“Andor is a story about many things, but at the center of it is a story about revolution and about everyday people making decisions in a very extreme moment in Star Wars history. Characters really have to make decisions all the way down the line — how people make decisions, how they fail to make the proper decisions, how they betray each other when they’re weak, what bravery means, what altruism really means, what evil and oppression really mean,” adds the showrunner.

You don’t need to be traditionally heroic to be a hero in the Resistance. 

Who Is Cassian Andor?

The TV series tracks Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) as he forges a dangerous path which will eventually lead him to become the leader of the Rebel Alliance. Andor first appeared in Rogue One, so Gilroy already had a firm idea of who this character was and his trajectory. Cassian Andor is a man of compelling contradictions. He bends the moral curve while allowing audiences to support actions of which they don’t morally approve.

“He’s a liar and thief who sells out his own clan. Andor readily admits he has a trail of dark morality. Within the action of the overarching story, he’s perfect as a war fighter. The Rebel Alliance trusts him to fight against the Galactic Empire. He has a confident resume. He’s a leader and a seducer. He’s so slick and tactical, he knows when to change his mind and when to doubt himself,” Gilroy elaborates.

The TV series is portrays Andor in a far less desirable light than in Rogue One. “He’s sort of an adopted son of a family that saved his life, and he’s grown up on this planet, Ferrix, in a really strong community. And he is kind of the guy that nobody wants to see right now. He owes money to everybody. His mom’s on his case all the time, and he’s certainly not lived up to his potential at this point.” He is the bad seed that blooms into a beautiful flower.

Much of Cassian Andor’s scoundrel persona stems from childhood trauma of witnessing the destruction of his home planet. “There is an anger and a bitterness inside of him.” And, while tending to his emotional scars, he is thrust into leading the rebellion as he marches toward his destiny.

Andor needs to break his self-sabotaging patterns and genuinely believe he can make a difference. Gilroy chose to write Andor being distant from the “competent, measured, calculating, calm, patient character you eventually meet in Rogue One.” Gilroy wanted to show how Andor changes over time. He wanted to show Andor can change.

The writer modestly describes his writing role on Rogue One as a “mechanic. It was a troubled production and I came on as a fixer.” The concept was fairly advanced before Tony Gilroy came on board so he didn’t create the story from scratch. “My work was a matter of saving the patient.” Once his patient began to walk on his own, Gilroy didn’t plan for future visits. Disney+ approached him after the success of Rogue One with the idea of a prequel TV series examining the evolution of Andor’s character. Disney+ had several approaches to how this might pan out, before eventually settling on Gilroy’s take. “Disney initially explored a continually replicating model for Andor where he and the droid would have adventures.” Andor couldn’t simply end up being another installation in the Star Wars franchise in Gilroy’s imagination.

Tony Gilroy

There are undoubtedly parallels drawn between Cassian Andor and Luke Skywalker as the key leaders of the Resistance. Gilroy deliberately kept them apart and ensured they didn’t intersect. “For the benefit of the TV show, I set up a new lane and vocabulary. It had to be grammatically and tonally different. It had to break new territory.”

“My studying of the story is restricted to the calendar and canonical material that occurs in the five years leading to Rogue One that I need to curate. I get upended whenever I look at older Star Wars material. I had tunnel vision.” Not that Gilroy isn’t a fan of the traditional Star Wars franchise and the characters that populate it. Andor didn’t live in that town.

Two Seasons To Cover Five Years

Gilroy was also in the enviable position of Disney+ ordering two seasons of Andor each comprising twelve episodes. “It was always known that the final scene of the second season of Andor would walk into the first scene of Rogue One.” The initial idea that Disney+ had was to build out Andor as a five year series each covering a one year time span eventually leading to Rogue. The approach proved to be unwieldy. After filming the first season of Andor, the production team concurred that this approach was unworkable.

They used the organizing principle of producing the series in blocks of three to move forward. The series essentially contains a sequence of stories comprising three episodes – the first, the interstitial and the final. That gave them four story blocks to cover over the five year period. Gilroy decided they could create gaps in the storyline to keep the series flowing more efficiently. “What if we do three episodes that take each year and write into the negative space of what happened during those year-long absences?,” he ponders. The second season of Andor will cover four years instead of the one that was originally discussed. There will be concentrated bursts of activity where one year would be represented in a few days before the story moved forward. It takes close to a year to film each season and another year in post-production, so all the creative decisions had to finalized early on.

Andor explores the overarching themes of imperialism and rebellion present in its Star Wars predecessors which George Lucas describes as a fantasy rather than sci-fi film. Andor plays as a thriller and explores issues of class, apartheid, oppression and politics. “The difference between his other writing is the size of the canvas. It feels like I’ve been a short story writer all my career and suddenly I’m writing a novel. I have over two hundred speaking parts in the first episode alone.” So long the story keeps Andor at the center of the action knowing of the upcoming revolution, the writer can successfully organize his modules and tell his sprawling story from multiple perspectives. “I can have the story told from the Empire’s point of view in multiple shades, I can have people in the Revolution that are dragged into it or yearning for it.”

Tony Gilroy has a history in the genre with his work in the first three Bourne movies. The beauty of his work on Andor is that he can separate himself from current world events and write about oppression, power, revolution, fascism. freedom, rebels and terrorism. The uniqueness of Andor is that it has an end in search of a journey to get there.

Gilroy has to move Andors’ character from someone who’s disinterested, self-interested, and selfish to someone who sacrifices himself for the revolution. “I know exactly where Andor needs to go. As long as I have that roadmap, I can put any other ornaments on the story tree,” contends Gilroy. “I have all the colors, all the paintbrushes, all the canvases.”

Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly. Photo courtesy of Disney+ and Lucasfilm Ltd.

Tony Gilroy writes in a particular style so he didn’t seek to emulate the tone of Star Wars. “I’m very specific, very character-oriented, and the story is going to move. I brought myself to the project rather than bringing the project to me,” he notes.

The Star Wars universe is both expansive and exhaustive in its reach. “Most of the characters may not know what a Jedi is or the royal family they’re following. They’re trying to get on with their lives,” asserts Gilroy. That thinking formed the basis of Gilroy’s approach in creating a spinoff series that is also a legitimate standalone. “We want many avenues and as many imaginative approaches we could bring to Star Wars.”

Other than the character of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), Gilroy could let his imagination roam free. “All the planets, characters and events wasn’t attached to any Star Wars or Rogue One source material.” He created his own bible comprising eight hundred pages of new characters, planets, and adventures..

Tony Gilroy commenced the writing process by writing the first three episodes of Andor and then wrote around eighty pages of the series bible including landmark scenes because he knew where he wanted to end up. He also wrote key dialogue as a way into these scenes. Then he recruited his brother Dan Gilroy and Beau Willimon (both credited writers) to help him break down his behemoth into manageable episode chunks. They holed up in a hotel with Luke Hull, their production designer, and their producer, to write the season.

Gilroy spent three years working on Andor. “I don’t know where I end and the show begins. There are some specificities of the eccentricities and big speeches in Andor that I really love.“