Tony Gilroy on ‘Andor,’ ‘Rogue One,’ the Star Wars Universe

Considering how reflective, candid, and loquacious he is in conversation, it’s maybe not surprising that Andor creator Tony Gilroy does not have trouble writing the incisive political monologues that help shape the show’s interior ideology and cultural reputation. It is a Star Wars show, yes, but it’s the Star Wars show that, over two seasons, has refuted all expectations of what a Star Wars show should be. No Jedi, no lightsabers, no Skywalkers. No chosen ones and no big bad evils, either — Andor is a series about the people who don’t get the Campbellian hero’s journey, whose names are forgotten, and whose sacrifices make rebellion possible. One monologue from the first season returns at the end of season two, as the imperial stooge Major Partagaz listens to a recording of a young revolutionary’s manifesto: “Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks. It leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.” “The degree of difficulty is not high,” Gilroy says when I ask him about writing those big, dramatic speeches. “It’s like shredding on a guitar. It’s really flashy, and people pay attention.”

But Gilroy is honest about the parts of Andor that have not been easy, too. He is palpably fond and proud of Andor, while also being blunt about the drudgery and exhaustion involved in willing this show into existence. He is also protective of it, writing backstory and weaving in the Force despite previous reluctance to include any of the universe’s mystical space magic, because Star Wars is nothing if not an endless canon machine. If he doesn’t do it, someone else will.

Why was it important to you to include Luthen and Kleya’s backstory at the end of season two?
They’re so mysterious. What is that relationship? It starts there. When Stellan Skarsgård came onto the show in the very beginning and it was going to be five seasons or 60 episodes or whatever, he said, “Hey, I’ll come on, but I’m going to come on for two years. You’ve got to promise me you’ll kill me at the end of two seasons.” And I said, “You don’t have to put that in your deal; it’s just between us, but I’ll make sure I take care of that.” I had written a very ornate, elaborate backstory for who he was and what happened, but it just fell under its own weight. It was too glommy. He said, “Look, let’s table this, but just make sure, as you think about it as we go along, I don’t want it to be revenge.” That was his one request: no revenge.

Elizabeth Dulau, who plays Kleya, came straight out of RADA — no jobs, no experience whatsoever — and about halfway through season one, I started to get more confident about her. The reports back from all the directors were, “She’s just amazing. We don’t have any film that doesn’t work of her.” There’s people that you don’t worry about. I don’t mind if I don’t know where Krennic comes from. But there are some elements of the Kleya and Luthen relationship that I didn’t want to leave lingering. They never touch. I don’t ever want to see them come from the same bedroom. I don’t ever want to suggest that there’s anything like that. I don’t ever want to say that she’s his daughter. Maybe I’m worried. Before anyone else defines it, I’m going to define it.

I hadn’t thought about it quite that way, as a defensive move inside a universe where anything that’s not canon will soon get defined by someone else. I already saw one suggestion that Kleya is Cassian’s sister.
Yeah, man. Oh my God. Everybody was the sister. You were the sister for five minutes.

But I can see why people wondered. The scene with Luthen and Kleya does mirror the Cassian and Maarva scenes from season one. 
You’re right. I did press with Stellan for the first time in London, and we’d never been paired up before, and it came up a bunch of times. And his feeling is that he’s been afraid of her from that very first moment, that she’s really been in control the whole time.

I also thought about how the Luthen and Kleya backstory, which arrives after we’ve already seen their future, is also the same way this series works. Andor is filling in this backstory when we already know the ending. But sometimes backstory feels revelatory, and sometimes it feels like homework, right? 
Oh hell yeah. I think there’s pretty clear evidence, in the way the season is structured, how I feel about this. My aversion to exposition has never been more challenged or expressed than in these yearlong gaps between each section of the show. I wrote the top and tail of each episode as proof of concept before we went into the writers’ room. I didn’t want any of the other writers or anybody involved in the show to say it can’t be done, or to write dialogue like, “Oh Kathryn, since the last time I saw you, how you’ve changed!” We don’t want any of that lard. If I can point you toward a backstory without ever saying anything, you’re going to write a better one for yourself than I ever could.

Have you ever seen the director’s cut of The Wild Bunch? It sucks. William Holden and Robert Ryan used to run together, and now they’re chasing each other. In the director’s cut, Sam Peckinpah shot a scene that flashes back and tells their story, and it’s freaking terrible. You should never pin that butterfly down.

But, I was defensively nervous of what people’s takeaway of the Kleya-Luthen relationship might be.

Given your aversion to homework-y backstory, how were you thinking about what parts of Rogue One you really wanted to set up, and what parts you were fine to ignore? 
Like what?

Like, for instance, Cassian and Jyn in Rogue One clearly feeling some romantic feelings for each other, even though Andor suggests Bix is the defining relationship of Cassian’s life? Or, what was it about Saw Gerrera in Rogue One that made him a crucial character for you to bring into Andor?
I have not gone back and watched Rogue One. Everybody else has, and I’ve been clearly timid about doing that. I was doing the dishes a couple of months ago and it was on, and I watched about 15 minutes and it was like, Wow, this is all okay! But everybody around me has done it, and I’ve been confirmed that everything is really cool.

Having been deeply involved in Rogue … I don’t think the relationship is inconsistent with the circumstances. Bix has been away for a  year. And, you know, it’s a frat house there at the end, and who knows where she is. And she left him. You know, they’re beautiful, lively people. Whose hand wouldn’t you hold at the end? I think it turns into that, which is cooler and more interesting. Maybe I’ll be wrong when I watch it.

On the downside, I know there are people, whole fan-fiction collections, who’ve made a huge investment in that being one of the great love stories of all time. It’s not canon, but they’ve invested a lot of time in it. It’s not without concern that I undo that, but it can’t be a motivation for me building the show.

Yes. To be clear, I personally prefer it when canon is a nice thing that everyone ignores whenever they feel like it, but this is Star Wars. 
I have, like, four levels of canon I have to pay attention to, and 19 I can ignore at my will. I’m exaggerating slightly but not too much. And I mean, who wouldn’t want Forest Whitaker, right? And Ben Mendelsohn, my God. But I have my practical story things I have to deliver. I have to get you to the first scene of Rogue One.

At one point, when it was difficult to get Ben for whatever reasons, I was going to have to invent a surrogate character and invest a lot of real estate in them. That was a pain in the ass. Ben gets me there right away. I thought for sure that I would have to bring back Danny Mays, who plays Tivik in Rogue One, the guy Cassian kills in the opening scene. I even went as far as to ask (casting director) Nina Gold. I said, “Maybe we should run down what Danny Mays looks like right now. Are we gonna have to de-age him? Is he available?” Providentially, once we had Lonni Jung steal the files about the Death Star, and once we started on the dialogue, it just snapped into place in a way that I didn’t need him.

There are people — not important people, but you know, faces and presences in Yavin 4 from Rogue — who either didn’t want to come back because they were unhappy they didn’t have more of a part or were unavailable. We brought everybody back we could.

I’ve heard you describe making TV as like a dairy-farm job that never stops.
Almost every day, everything you’ve ever learned — whether it’s politically, socially, creatively; everything you’ve ever read; everything you know about fabrics, or people, or hair, or anything — you have to be able to do it, or you have to have someone, a producer, who’ll do it for you. The shocking thing is how often the limitations lead to superior solutions.

Of those things you listed just now — hair and fashion and politicking and terrible conversations about money — which of those do you enjoy, and which do you dread? 
The scoring is the happiest place for me. I’m just the happiest while I’m doing it. The least favorite would be … Well, arguing about money is no fun at any time. Trying to decide whether you’re going to be Napoleon or Ho Chi Minh on any given day is not an amusing choice.

But the least favorite is writing action — the precision that it takes to do it right, and the amount of work that goes into it to make it disappear. No one can help you. You get really cranky, and it requires all this energy, and at the end, if you do it right, it just disappears as if that’s how it was always going to be. I’ve been doing it for so long, and there’s only one way to do it, which is the hard way: How many meters is it from here to the café? How long does it take to walk from her office to here? It’s so persnickety. I wrote a movie over the summer that only has one goofy action scene in it, and oh my God, it was more liberating than anything.

How much of your imagined story for Andor shifted as you moved from the early 60-episode plan to this much shorter version? 
I had no difficulty jettisoning the 60-episode concept. It was so unrealistic, and it wasn’t really a decision. It was, Oh my God, we’re completely fucked. What are we gonna do? I cannot express the naïveté and ignorance with which I entered this project.

Looking back, are there things you would change now that you know how much you’ve learned while making this show? 
Trying to transport the process from one project to the next is a huge error. Everything defines how it wants to be. If COVID hadn’t happened, and everything hadn’t been stopped and I had proceeded, it would have been a disaster. You’d be writing a whole other story about how Tony Gilroy just squandered it.

There are probably 1,200 people who only know me like this, as a Zoom screen. Staying here for five years, and rewriting my own scripts, writing everyone else’s scripts, changing them when the money changed, and just writing and writing and writing allowed me to have 20 meetings a day without having to remember everybody’s name or go from meeting to meeting to meeting. It meant that we could create a system based on extremely obsessive and unusual preparation of scripts.

By the time the scripts were done, there had been meetings on every single aspect — every color and shoe and prop. Every single thing has been vetted by these blueprint scripts. And that script is given to the director and the actors, and I never go to set. I went a couple of times; it’s always disruptive when I go.

Other shows aren’t like that. They have A, B, and C versions, and everything’s in chaos. There are two writers on the set, and people are writing all the time, and everybody’s got vertigo. Think of all the time that gets wasted. We never wasted any time. Actors and directors show up on set, wardrobe shows up, everybody shows up, and they know what we’re going to do, and they can just swing away.

All that attention to detail, I find, has shaped so much of how I remember the show, and how I think about it tonally. There’s this tendency to combine absolutely devastating moments with some little bit of Star Wars–y fabric that shifts the perspective or makes it just a touch absurd. The one that stuck with me for some reason is the shot of Lonni Jung’s corpse on the bench, and then this adorable, ridiculous alien corgi thing wanders by and sniffs at him. 
You would be so happy to know how many meetings there were on that stupid dog. I think I approved three different dogs. Like, “Yeah, that dog is fine for me.” “Okay, that dog is also fine for me.” Then people kept raising their hand: “I think it looks like a raccoon.” “I don’t like this dog.” And then Johnny (Gilroy’s brother John, an art designer) would call up and go, “Dude, I think you could push these guys further, because they’re not happy with the dog.” And then what the dog sounds like — I think I approved like three different sounds for the dog. And then they want to name the dog. For the credits! Oh my God, I gotta tell my brother you asked about the dog. He’s gonna laugh.

Wait, what’s the dog’s name?
I have to go back and look. (Shaking head in exasperation.) I don’t know. I don’t know what the dog’s name is.

We got some heat for being under-creatured in season one. I think we tried to work on that when we could. I maybe didn’t ever crack the code of how to fully embrace creatures into everything else that we were doing.

You did droids, though. 
Yeah, droids are easy.

Why? 
I don’t know why I said that. But droids have always been easy. I’m all in on B2; that’s my big legacy for droidism. I think that’s the greatest droid ever, the dog droid. No one ever did a dog droid. I’m very happy with that.

The most successful creatures I wrote were in season one when they escaped from Narkina 5, and then Cassian and Melshi see the two fisherman. I wrote this whole alien language for them, and they’re so great. People were like, “If you can do that, why aren’t you doing more of it?” But it was a lot of work.

That last shot of Bix standing in the wheat field is such a striking image. How long did you know that would be the end of her story? When did you decide it would be her and Cassian’s baby? 
I think as I started to sketch the second season, I had a couple of realizations. One, that’s a really hard road, and it’s a pretty grueling experience for the people going through it. The show is about the people that are the gravel the revolution is built on and forgotten. I wanted some element of hope. I wanted to have something legitimately positive and forward. My own personal worldview, in the end, is really not that dark.

No. 2, Bix is a businesswoman, she’s sexually liberated, and she runs her own shit. She’s just so together, but then she’s so knocked down by being tortured and having to battle back. You don’t see it, but she spends a year with Cassian on missions and is still tortured, taking drugs to sleep. And her sacrifice is so epic — to leave. I was concerned that it would be dewy or sentimental or easy in some way, but knowing Adria Arjona, who plays Bix, would walk out there the way she would, knowing she’s on such firm footing, and you fuck with her at your peril … I knew it would be beautiful and graphic, but not sentimental. I wanted it to be more like a Soviet propaganda poster than a Hallmark card.

There’s a similar risk with introducing the Force healer near the end, that it becomes something sentimental. 
Same dial on the desk, yeah.

Were you considering never including the Force at all? 
I think I’d advertised that in the beginning. But I began to think that was abusive. We’d been pulling Cassian through all these important moments without him realizing it. He lands on Yavin — there was actually another step where he was going to stop someplace we weren’t familiar with, but we didn’t have the money to create a new planet. So, where could he land? Could it be Yavin? So I called Lucasfilm, the Vatican, and there’s nothing on Yavin at that point. So that’s kind of goofy. He’s been everywhere, right? He’s been all these places where all of these things happen.

I mean this in a respectful way, I promise: It’s a little Forrest Gump. 
Yeah, hell yeah. A little bit! He’s always at the scene of the crime. So why shy away from that?

Reluctant destiny is really interesting. If you’re gonna go for flat-out destiny, that’s kind of bullshit. But reluctant destiny, my God, you could base major religions on that. And yes, if I take control of it, I can dial it in.

Oh, it’s the Luthen and Kleya backstory again. 
Yeah. If I’m in control of it, then you can’t make it bad.