Tony Gilroy On The ‘Andor’ Season 2 Finale, Cassian’s Sister & Disrupting ‘Star Wars’ Canon

SPOILER ALERT: The following interview contains spoilers about tonight’s Season 2 finale of Disney+’s Andor.

Star Wars fans can be a finicky bunch, but Tony Gilroy has been fearless, much like the series creator George Lucas, in delivering to them. His Andor is altogether jawdropping in production design, overly layered in its rebel spies and architects’ motivations to unite as one against the Empire and unabashed to get down into the nitty gritty details. Forget about lightsaber fights, at one point during Season 2 there’s a discussion about interest rates in the galaxy. Gilroy started the season on an intentionally fiery note with Diego Luna’s future rebel leader Cassian Andor crashing around in a Tie-Fighter. It was his response to fans saying that Andor Season 1 began to slow. However, as the series ends, Gilroy has opted to end Cassian’s segue into Rogue One with an ease more than a bang.

DEADLINE: In your granular storytelling, you have disrupted the Star Wars canon. What did you feel the series was lacking?

TONY GILROY: I think it was a marriage of two appetites. The attraction was the opportunity to work on this scale. The first decades of my career have been as a short story writer, and I feel like this is an epic novel. It was also the opportunity to use all the self-education I’d done over 40 years on history.

All of the stuff that had been banging around in my head all these years — Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, Oliver Cromwell, Zapata, I got to go deep on. I had no place to put that, and this was like, wow, they want me to do a show that takes place over a five-year period about a revolution and the people inside it.

DEADLINE: You’re from a family of writers. Your father is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. What’s some advice he shared?

GILROY: He moved out of Hollywood so that no one would go into it. There was a great library in the house. Our mother was much more influential on us because we were always making stuff pre-cognition, like painting rooms, knitting and making walls. She made the process of creation so fundamental to us. My father didn’t teach us how to write at all. But what you do get… this is what I think people ignore about the nepotism thing: No one is going to make your movie because you know somebody. You’ve got to deliver. It’s not the people that you meet. What you learn is what the life looks like. It makes sense to me, a writer’s life. My father would be home for three months, then gone for three months. We’d be fabulously wealthy one year and dead broke the next. He’d have a big hit, then have his teeth kicked in; the play closes on opening night. You learn what the life is. I think that is the superpower. No one is teaching you how to write at the kitchen table.

DEADLINE: What happened to Cassian’s sister, the one he was looking for in Season 1, Episode 1? There wasn’t any closure on that by the end of the series?
GILROY: No, there wasn’t. I did it in the beginning because I’m always leaving things for myself to try to pick up on. There are all kinds of things that I do to pick up on later, or things that I lay down so writers will pick up on them in the room. But what I found was, with the sister, when I put it in there, I didn’t know how I was going to resolve it, and at one point, I had some melodramatic version of how that would play out in a Season 2. But as I went along, I realized, as I got to know Cassian, a very important absence in his life; the fact that he left her behind is a hole that will never be filled. When you watch the show, how many times does he go back for people? In fact, Bix even says, when they take off and escape from Ferrix, “Cassian will find us.” He goes back for Maarva. He goes back for Kleya. The savior component of him is much more interesting to me than some resolution. How many things in your life are unresolved?

DEADLINE: Unlike the Season 1 finale of Andorit seemed quieter this time.

GILROY: We were always going to take our foot off the gas. It was about making sure that the linkage was proper to Rogue Onethat it was a summing up of all of the characters that we carried along. So much of Season 2 at the end is about the endurance and fortitude and the price that everybody has paid over time.

DEADLINE: Dedra Meero is in prison. Why? She’s the sharpest tool in the shed.

GILROY: Yeah, but she completely screwed up. I mean, by the time Krennic gets done with her, the whole ISB is coming apart. Partagaz has to kill himself. He commits seppuku on the conference room. They have really sh*t the bed there in every way. She’s lucky she’s not dead, but she’s in Narkina.

DEADLINE: Mon Mothma always felt like Pelosi. However, in watching this season, despite the rich people who are on the right side of history, despite their good intentions, despite funding the revolution, it feels like they have some sort of disillusionment between what they’re doing and what’s happening on the ground. They don’t know the blood and the pain, and it takes someone like Cassian to grab Mon Mothma and walk her through a crowd, almost like — ‘This is serious now, You’re in it.’

GILROY: Cassian killed somebody right in front of her. I’m not sure she’s ever seen that before. Look, I would say, number one, there’s a rich history of elite classes joining revolutions. I mean, the easiest comp is the early Christians back in Rome. A lot of Roman elites became Christians, and then you go all the way down, you come to our century, you go to the Baader Meinhof Group. We had all these rich kids who were, you know, in the Red Brigade. It’s really fascinating, because Genevieve O’Reilly and I have had this conversation.

Mon Mothma is jealous of her cousin. Vel can go out, and as a physical expression, can use her body and use her life and her blood and her guts to fight the revolution. Mon Mothma has to sit in a terrarium with everybody watching her every minute all the time. I actually think that what she goes through is in many ways, more heroic than anybody and much more tension-making, and the wedding is the beginning of the escalation of that anxiety. I mean, she’s already pretty ramped up at the end of Season 1. A year later — it’s a torture for her. It’s torture for her.

DEADLINE: Neither Grand Moff Tarkin nor Darth Vader show up. Why?

GILROY: If I’d needed them, I would’ve brought them in.

DEADLINE: You mentioned that at the end of Season 2, Cassian would walk straight into the movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Nonetheless, was a Season 3 possibly on the table?

GILROY: Well, what would it be? What would Season 3 be? I don’t know what Season 3 would be. I don’t know how to figure that one out.

DEADLINE: Is there more Star Wars for you?

GILROY: I don’t think so. I’ve been doing it for 10 years now, between Rogue and this.

DEADLINE: What’s next?

GILROY: I wrote a movie Behemoth! that I’m trying to get off the ground. It’s about movie music, the people who make it. I have Oscar Isaac. I’ve been trying to raise the money, but I’ve been having a lot of trouble.