What We Can Expect From 'Star Wars: Andor', According To Stars And Creator

Of all the Star Wars projects currently in the works at Disney and Lucasfilm, Star Wars: Andor is next in line for the episodic treatment on Disney+. Following the exploits of Cassian Andor of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story fame before his untimely demise at the end of that film, the series has been somewhat shrouded in mystery until recently.

At the Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, Los Angeles, stars of the show were out in force as fans got a brand new trailer for the series which is set to debut on August 31st. GAMINGbible were fortunate enough to chat to Andor star Diego Luna who reprises the titular role, Genevieve O'Reilly who also returns as Mon Mothma, and the series’ creator Tony Gilroy.

Before we get into that though, check out the trailer for Star Wars: Andor here.

Perhaps the biggest question on the minds of fans is ‘What exactly can we expect from Andor?’ Well, luckily, Diego Luna was happy to explain. “Definitely there’s a spy-ish element, there is a thriller element, there is adventure too,” he explained. “It’s epic and huge but it also sometimes gets very intimate. Here, everyone knows the ending. So it’s not about what’s going to happen, it’s about how it’s going to happen. It’s quite interesting because it’s a different perspective, you know? I think the show can allow itself to be different from everything else in this universe and that’s a beautiful thing - hopefully an exciting one for the fans.”

Tony Gilroy, who created not only Star Wars: Andor but also wrote the screenplay for Rogue One, is perhaps best known for his work on the Bourne franchise. We asked if there would be any similarities between the interpretation of Cassian Andor and that of Jason Bourne. “Hopefully everything I do is character oriented,” Gilroy began. “It’s believing the characters and what the characters do. Bourne came about as a reaction to a lot of orchestral, gigantic action pictures and I kept saying ‘Let’s make something acoustic’, and finally did it. There’s an element of that going on here, in that Star Wars has gone really big, really glossy in a certain way, and we’re kind of disrupting that by saying ‘Let’s get really small and really behavioural, let’s get really great actors, let’s have really intense scenes and let’s try to see if we can do some storytelling like that’. So if there’s any parallel, it’s more in the tempo and the granularity of it. Every character is unique.”

Certainly the emphasis here seems to be really zooming in on these characters in a more personal way, and not gazing up at what’s going on in the galaxy as a whole as we’ve seen in other Star Wars works, especially in the films. With the success of series’ like The Mandalorian, it’s clear Disney are keen for these individual stories to be the focus of their output in the near future.

Another character who we’ll get to understand better is Mon Mothma. Appearing in the

original Star Wars trilogy as the leader of the Rebel Alliance, Mothma again appeared in Rogue One played by Genevieve O'Reilly who will be returning to her the role in Andor. While it’s not clear what their characters will interact, I’m hedging my bets that it’ll be a kind of James Bond and M type relationship, with Mothma sending Andor out on his various espionage missions in the name of the Rebel Alliance.

“I think the best way to say it is how we begin Andor,” says O’Reilly on what we learn about Mon Mothma. “So, we know in Rogue One where we’re going, she is the leader of the Rebellion. When we begin Andor, she is mired within the Empire. She is steeped within the Galactic Senate trying to effect change from within, trying to gather opposition to Palpatine within the political sphere. Obviously she fails, we know that, so what’s fascinating for me is that we learn about this woman and this journey and this wrestle and this fight with words and trying to effect change.”

Well, that certainly sheds just a little more light on what we can expect from Star Wars: Andor when it comes to Disney+ on August 31st of this year.