Tony Gilroy On Bringing “Andor” to The End

As Star Wars "Andor"’s second and final season comes to an end, it stands as a monument to some of the best writing on television today. This treatise on the terrors of authoritarianism and fascism could not be more relevant, and it’s written with such an elegant eye for dialogue, juxtaposition of images, and an honest portrayal of truth that it’s impossible to ignore. Add how compelling the actors and setting are, and you have one of the best television shows ever made, regardless of the fact that it’s set in a galaxy far, far away.

Though this season has been written and in development for years, it’s somehow matching a political moment that has put it in the zeitgeist in a way that few would have expected a year ago. As you’ll see in the interview, however, the show is really rooted in history, and history repeating itself—as Star Wars always has been. And that’s what makes it continually relevant. It’s not just a pop-culture extravaganza, referencing itself over and over again, Star Wars has never been that. No good science fiction or fantasy that offers a mirror for reflection of social ills has.

Tony Gilroy fashioned some incredible moments through this season while holding that mirror. We spoke to him after the first arc of the show released and in this second part of the interview, we followed up on some questions and asked some specifics about the finale of the show.

Be warned, there will be spoilers.

SCRIPT Magazine: The last time we spoke, you talked about how you work for the moments you're writing teaspoon by teaspoon. One of the moments that felt tremendous was Cassian’s, “Who are you?” moment with Syril Karn at the Ghorman Massacre. It felt very much like an echo of Krennic's moment in Rogue One with Jyn. I'm wondering what sort of teaspoons brought you that moment.

Tony Gilroy: I hadn't thought about that. I think it's a different dynamic. I knew that that they were going to have the confrontation. I knew that was going to happen there.

I considered the fury and what kind of fight it would be. I had early discussions with Mark Maley, who's the stunt coordinator on the show, about where we would do it and how we would do it a little bit. I think it was safe to say that even though in a sort of straight up cage fight Cassian would absolutely win nine times out of 10 against Syril, the fury that he would bring would make the fight unusual—that absolute blind, raging fury. It was like being attacked by a wild animal.

I don't know if I had the idea before then or concurrent with that would be like, what? I'm in the middle of asking what is this? Who is this? I mean, the stunning incomprehensibility about being attacked by another Ghorman human being. So the the “Who are you?” was really obvious to me. I had it in there and it was somewhat controversial with production as they went through it, there were a lot of phone calls back and forth. They wanted to get alternative lines and they thought it may not work. “You haven't really seen the fight,” and so on.

I was not swayed by those questions. I had really called [Diego Luna] on the phone the night before and said, “Man, I don't care. You can get all the alts you want, but, I'm telling you, I'm going with this line. Go get a great one out and then you can give me all the alts you want. I'm not going to use them, but we can play with it if you want.”

SCRIPT Magazine: I saw on the Star Wars livestream interview you said you had to fight for it.

Tony Gilroy: I just had to convince them. I mean, there's a couple different things. Look, there's times that I've been completely wrong about and you watch them happen, and you're like, “Wow, I was so wrong about that.” But this was one I really was convinced with. I just thought it was the most Greek essential thing you could have. I think I even said to them, “I'm naming the episode Who Are You? So, I knew it was right.

SCRIPT Magazine: One of the other moments is in the finale going back to Narkina Five.

Tony Gilroy: Or Narkina Three or Two or whichever. Narkina was five was a male human facility.

SCRIPT Magazine: Fair. Going back to a prison like Narkina. Was that always the fate you had in mind for Dedra Meero? That moment—which plays with no dialogue, and she plays it so beautifully, and the the defeat she has there is so wonderful. That's one of those great moments for her character that you built so wonderfully in these last two arcs with her messing up with Luthen and the Axis situation, and Krennic coming back and just the way she gets chewed up and spit out. What put you on that path of that trajectory for her?

Tony Gilroy: When we finished season one, I remember telling Luke [Hull, Production Designer]—-because they're so careless about sets and storage is such a problem that they destroy everything—I said, “Save me a piece of Narkina. I'm not exactly sure what we'll do, but save a good, camera-ready piece of Narkina.”

And then as season two started to sketch into into focus, I have a number of people that I knew what might work.

I probably had the Anton Lesser, character, Partagaz, side of it. First I thought that has to be because I love that character. I love that actor so much. I think he's really an unsung hero in the show and doesn't get enough attention. I called Anton and said, “Hey, I'm going to do this really cool thing here." And he was very excited. But one of the things I really wanted to do was I wanted you to feel really bad for them, for Partagaz and for Dedra. I want you to really be emotionally connected, because if I'm going to tell the full story of authoritarianism and oppression and revolution, and by that I mean fascism, when it gets done destroying the people it wants to oppress and destroying the institutions it wants to destroy and ruining the communities it wants to ruin, it comes after its own. Fascism always eats its foot soldiers and early proponents in the end. It's just shocking. I wanted to get that. And she and Partagaz, their sin is working. If she'd kicked back and just ironed her uniform and played her part, she’d be fine. But she worked too hard. Fascism eats its young. I wanted to make sure that you feel something when you see that it's worse than death.

SCRIPT Magazine: It very much is. She took the punishment for believing too hard. Another question I have, do you feel like Cassian’s story was left a bit as a dangling thread without a payoff?

Tony Gilroy: No. I feel two things. One, I think it's legit because we all have unresolved things in life. You may be the only person who has stuff that's unresolved in their life, but you're few and far between. More important than that, it really became clear to me pretty quickly that her absence and the failure to return and the guilt of that was worth way more to me than any coincidental or potentially cheesy or suspicious return of a sister. It allows us to say at the end—which is really a throwaway line, and it's Faye Marsay who just gives great lines up, she just does the best job with them—when Mon comes to her and says, “You’ve got to tell me about Cassian because he went back for Kleya,” and Vel says, like, “He should stop saving people.”

I mean, it’s what he’s doing all the way through, you know? He leaves his sister behind. He leaves his mother behind and says "I'm going to go. I'm going to be back," but he never gets to see her again. He's had to leave a lot of things behind. And having that really helps identify why he's doing what he’s doing in Rogue One, too.

SCRIPT Magazine: Speaking of Kleya, her episode where she goes in and we get her backstory with Luthen and her mission into the hospital. It's a really wonderful episode, even though it’s outside the structure of how you'd set up the other episodes. Right?

Tony Gilroy: Definitely. It's completely different. Yeah.

SCRIPT MAGAZINE: I'm wondering what the back and forth about whether or not you did it that way was like.

Tony Gilroy: I promised Stellan Skarsgård in the beginning when he signed on that we were going to do five years and he only wanted to do two seasons and would I kill him? I said, “I have the power of the pen. And so if we if you want out, I'll get you out.”

One of the other things that we talked about is that he's not a real crazy backstory guy, but we talked about where does this guy come from? What is he? What do I need? Are you going to be able to come up with that? I came up with a very ornate, very busy, complicated version of who he was. Probably spent a couple of days on some stupid thing, and we both agreed it sank under its own weight and wondered how are we going to get this out? And boy, I don't know, is this going to be that kind of show?

Maybe in a five season show that would have had a place as a flashback. But he's a lucky guy. We decided not to worry about it then, and said to just make sure that it's not revenge. He didn't want revenge to be his motivator. And then when we did season one, Elizabeth Dulau was just such a surprise. As Kleya, she was a third choice. Two other actors had gotten the part and then gotten bigger parts in other shows and she came in and we said let's see how good she is. And. Oh, my God, she's just tremendous. And then the commitment to do the standalone episode happened, you couldn't put it in any earlier.

When I was sketching the four season thing, I had on my list of navigational scenes that must happen, I knew Dedra has to go into the gallery. It has to be there, I have to have that scene. Right? And what better place than there to stage it? And God, how could he survive that? So it just sort of naturally became that piece. And then finding the young girl who plays her was such a get because if you're an actor and half your performance is going to be informed by a 7-year-old and to have her come in and be so amazing and so clear, such a great match? That's how it happened.

SCRIPT Magazine: You mentioned there were times where you felt like you got it wrong. I'm wondering if you could tell me one of those times where you were writing and it came back you were wrong, and it came back better than you expected.

Tony Gilroy: I mean, a really simple one, it's not a writing thing. It's more a directing thing. When Eedy comes to Deedra's apartment to have lunch with them in episode three. And after it just gets so horrible, Syril just gets up from the table and he disappears. He goes out of the room. When you come back, he's lying on the bed. He's just in a semi-fetal—not even that, he can't even get there, he’s not even a fetal position. He's just lying inertly on the bed as he hears them in the other room, and then he gets it up. I hated that I when I saw the dailies come in. I remember calling the director and I go, “Tell me there's other takes. I think this is so over the top and he can hear them and I hate this and I really hated on it.” And they cut it in anyway. And then they were like, “Dude, you're wrong. This is really good.”

And, I mean, I saw it with an audience and people just loved it. I was wrong. Completely wrong. That happens. It happened regularly. And wrong is the wrong word. I was, uh, incorrect. Yeah.

SCRIPT Magazine: What sort of input were you taking to fuel yourself creatively as you were writing this season?

Tony Gilroy: I couldn't read a lot of fiction. I probably read the least amount of fiction I've ever read in my life over the last five years. This was daily, literally every day. No exaggeration. Every single day for five years. Full use of all the imagination that you can summon, not just for the writing of the scripts and fixing dialogue and pages and all that are coming up with stuff, but wardrobe and casting and world-building and all of the design things and all of it. You don't have a lot of room left in your tank to go into somebody else's world at night. You know, to lay down with a book wasn't as comfortable. I read some fiction but not a lot. My wife and I have probably watched—I mean, it would be hard to name a show that we didn't watch. We've been very, very comprehensive about about watching things. So, watched a lot of shows. I've seen a lot of television and a lot of a lot of films, almost exclusively at home, because it started at COVID. If you want to know what the things were that were influential…

SCRIPT Magazine: Definitely.

Tony Gilroy: I would say that I'll pick a couple weird things. Babylon Berlin was really an eye opener to me. I was like, wow, man. I mean, the first 18 episodes, man. That you could be that big and that beautiful and that stinky. I just loved it. That was like a Beatles album for me. Like, “Oh my God. This can be done?” And very inspirational in terms of the scope of the show and the ambitions of the show.

A crazy little show called The French Village that was on for seven years that we watched, which is this French show about even years in real time of the German occupation of France. It takes it from the day they invade to the day after they leave, when they're on the run. And it's literally what it says. It's a French village and it started off very cheaply. Another writer turned me on to it and said, "Hey, you might dig this show." It starts off very cheaply and kind of threadbare. They obviously got traction in France. By the time it gets to the second and third season, they have a hit. Two of the actors from the Ghorman episodes—Thierry Godard and Richard Sammel—who both had big parts. So we watched all of that.

Podcasts were big. Mike Duncan's Revolutions I listened to all the way through beforehand Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, which is about the French Revolution, and is just a masterpiece. House of Government which is this really insane survey of the Russian Revolution by a guy who's been studying it his whole life and, and digs into the molecular romance of young people because there's so many young people. It's fascinating. I don't know, things like that.

SCRIPT Magazine: That's exactly the kind of stuff I'm interested in. There's this mistake people have in looking at Star Wars and going, “Star Wars is what you need to look at to figure out how to make Star Wars.” And that's not the case.

Tony Gilroy: Never. No, I never watched any Star Wars. I couldn't watch the other shows. In the beginning, because "Mandalorian" was so great when it started and I was watching it and and then as I got into my show, it was really unsettling for me to watch other Star Wars. I just always had the continual feeling I was doing something wrong. So I just stopped. I just couldn't do it. So I didn't watch any Star Wars.

SCRIPT Magazine: Last question and just for my peace of mind, because I was going crazy. I wrote a piece on Slashfilm about it, but I felt like I was picking out of the Ghorman Massacre, Casablanca and Battleship Potemkin.

Tony Gilroy: They're definitely there. Battle of Algiers and The Conformist, too. The Conformist was really for what Syril's going through and also from a design point of view.  When we were designing Ghorman, Luke [Hull] and I looked at all the marbles and the whites and the different things. And having a city that's somewhere between Milan and Mecca. And so I always think of it that way. And Army of Shadows and, my God, the list goes on and on and on. The French Village, too.

SCRIPT Magazine: Yeah, that moment where they start singing the Ghorman anthem felt very much like La Marseillaise in Rick's Cafe.

Tony Gilroy: It is a little bit. It is, isn't it? It is. And I'm sure that was. I got it so burned into my mind, that scene. I'm sure it's really in there. Part of that's practical, you know, I’ve got all these people out there. They’ve got to be out there for a certain length of time. We can't just keep screaming, “The galaxy is watching.”  They have to be doing something. What's really touching and what's really prideful? The idea of the anthem came. I was like, of course they have an anthem. And then it was like, what's the anthem? So Nick Patel and I, we listened to a bunch of national anthems and it was like, some are great, some suck. We have to write our own national anthem. So we wrote that song together and, um.

But I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, there's nothing new under the sun, right? But you're right. And Battleship Potemkin, for sure. I mean, the, you know…

SCRIPT Magazine: The Odessa Steps and that stuff…

Tony Gilroy: Yeah. Yeah. And I was unaware of the student riots in Mexico City and the parallels to the false flag and the snipers killing their own soldiers. That was not on my radar, but apparently there's a comp for that. For the the riots in the ‘60s in Mexico City that were super violent. Two different people sent me that. Did you model this after that? I'm like, I don't even know about this. I know about Zapata, but I don't know about I don't know about Mexico City in the 60s. No.

SCRIPT Magazine: That's all the the the time we've got. I hope we get to to talk again in the future on whatever you've got going next or maybe more about this. I could talk about writing this stuff for ages. Thanks so much for all the time you've given me.

Tony Gilroy: Thanks for hanging in, man.

"Andor" is streaming in its entirety exclusively on Disney+.

Bryan Young is a filmmaker writer, and Star Wars expert, you can find out more about him on his website, www.swankmotron.com.