We’re almost there, with just four days to go until the second and final season of Andor arrives on Disney Plus, and taking with The Hollywood Reporter, showrunner Tony Gilroy discusses the pressures of following up that critically acclaimed and award-laden first season, the writers strike, recasting, unavailable actors and more.
Knowing that the series would end up on the doorstep of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Gilroy hoped to populate Yavin 4 Rebel Base with as many familiar faces as possible. But the realities of production meant that they had to forgo some actors and even recast.
“Legacy characters are really tricky to bring back. They’re very, very expensive. A lot of times, their schedules don’t work out,” Gilroy shares. “There’s probably a couple people that we wanted to have in Yavin at the end, who are in the beginning of Rogue, but we just couldn’t get them because they were busy.”
He also credits Disney and Lucasfilm for not pressuring him to insert the most storied Star Wars characters into the fold. “On the creative side, I will never have an experience like this ever again,” Gilroy adds. “It’s just amazing that they trusted us, and they backed our play all the way through.”
As he’s stated several times throughout the last couple years, Andor season two will be Gilroy’s swan song in the Star Wars franchise. When you consider his reconfiguration of Rogue One during post-production, he’s already given nearly a decade of his life to the galaxy far, far away. And across Andor‘s two seasons, he’s done a staggering amount of work the last five years, likening each block of three episodes to a feature film. (Both seasons have a combined total of eight blocks.)
