If you want any indication of how proud Tony Gilroy is of the second and final season of Andor: A Star Wars Story, you only have to look at just how many interviews he’s been a part of over the past four weeks, and right here there’s plenty more as we arrive at the final week of the show. To start, Gilroy spoke with Bryan Young of Scriptmag about pausing his watch of The Mandalorian because he felt it was soo good, he must be doing Star Wars wrong.
“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.”
Speaking with Screenrant, he delved into some of the loose ends fans might want to know more about.
“Dedra’s not going anywhere,” he said, continuing, “Vel… her job is pretty clearly stated. She’s a base commander at Yavin. I’m sure she’s there all during Rogue and the rest of it. Mon Mothma–obviously, we know what’s happened with her.”
When it comes to Bix and Cassian’s child, Gilroy had even less: “I don’t know the sex of the child, or the name of the child, or anything.”
Gilroy discussed his next non-Star Wars project with Slashfilm, featuring a huge GFFA star.
“It’s about a cellist. Oscar Isaac is going to play the cellist. It’s a cellist who comes back to L.A. from a very heavy studio, third-generation music family. He comes back to L.A. for a few months to do sessions on movies. […] It’s [about] why he came back and why he went away, and whatever […] It was really nice to go back and write a movie. I wrote very quickly. I was in really good shape and wrote much more sharply than I probably would’ve done it five years ago.”
Gilroy spoke with Vanity Fair about the fate of Dedra Meero.
“We don’t save a lot of sets. They’re very carnivorous over there. They destroy everything. So I remember telling Luke Hull, the show’s production designer, “Oh man, save a piece of Narkina. Save me a shot of that cell, because I think we’ll probably use it.” I mean, it’s the fitting result of her monkey business, isn’t it, really?”
Next up Deadline, and a question that’s been asked since Cassian was chasing her down on Morlana One – whatever happened to his sister Kerri?
“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?”
Decider asked the same question, with Gilroy giving this answer.
“No, I mean, I just got off an interview with someone wondering if we’d ever thought of having her be Cassian’s sister. You know what I mean? It’s like, no, I never, no. It would’ve been inappropriate to do it,” Gilroy said.
Entertainment Weekly ask about that already infamous final shot, a scene that fans are sure to talk about for years to come.
“More than anything, I wanted to end on hope,” the creator says. “I really want to be hopeful at the end of it. It’s a very rigorous ride. We’ve done all kinds of things in this show all the way through, but it would be a crime against nature to not finish with something hopeful, because what else do we have? I mean, we have to have that. And as long as it’s not cheesy and not some corny thing, it felt like it was really earned and legit.”
But while Gilroy wanted to end on hope, it was not necessarily the new hope (see what we did there?) of a Cassian brand extension. “It is not just a way of creating another character for Disney and Lucasfilm,” Gilroy insists. “It’s really much more about finishing on an up note and finishing with something that I think all the people who made the show really want to express, which is that in the end, we really do want to be hopeful.”
The Bullseye conducted a Q&A with Gilroy, while The Hollywood Reporter asked why Kino Loy (Andy Sekis) didn’t return for season 2, and question that Gilroy had the perfect anzswer to.
“Andy dropped the mic, man,” Gilroy explained. “What am I going to do that’s going to be better than what we did? All it does is minimize that moment. I knew a lot of people were talking about whether we had a way of [bringing him back]. But I didn’t want to have that sort of coincidental environment.”
THR also asked about the ill-feted Syril Karn, a character Gilroy has some sympathy for.
“I’ve always viewed him right from the very beginning as a romantic and a fantasist that has this incredibly rich internal life. And I think at lot of times that people go where they’re liked, where they’re encouraged. There is a scenario under which he might’ve taken an entirely different path. I think you can see on Ghorman that he likes it there. He’s grown comfortable there. It certainly appeals to his fashion sense and to his fastidiousness. When the massacre happens, so many things are upended for him and have come undone. The amount of chaos that’s just been visited on his soul is almost incomprehensible. And then to see [Cassian] through this dream state, to see the person you have been chasing for years, and then to have them not even know who you are … I feel for all these characters, but I’m really sympathetic towards Syril.”
