Faye Marsay, the actress behind Vel Sartha, cousin of Mon Mothma and brave warrior of the nascent rebellion in Star Wars: Andor speaks with The Independent about her career, the roles she’s played and the very welcome online response to her openly queer character.
While her Westeros waif may have drawn the ire of Arya stans, reaction to Marsay’s recent Star Wars role has been unanimously positive. This is especially heartening, given the franchise’s reputation for housing a small minority of abusive bigots among its fans. (John Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran and Moses Ingram are among the Star Wars stars who have suffered torrents of racist abuse.) In Andor, Marsay plays Vel Sartha, a queer woman who, along with her partner, Cinta Kaz (Varada Sethu), constitute the first meaningfully queer characters in Star Wars’ 46 years on screen. I ask about a potential backlash, fearing the worst. “I’ve not had any,” Marsay reveals. “Nothing. It’s gorgeous. And reassuring. And the way it should be.”
It probably helped, of course, that Andor is the best Star Wars release in years, a gripping, extremely well-made action-drama about radical resistance in the face of fascism. The significance of Marsay’s role took a while to sink in. “While we were filming, I wasn’t thinking too much about it,” she says. “But then when you think about what it means to the community, and what it says to the massive bunch of people that need to see themselves mirrored in the shows they watch. The further we got, the more myself and Varada were aware that we were the first openly written queer characters, and how important that was.
“The way it was done wasn’t some big announcement,” she continues. “Like I always say: people in the LGBTQI+ community, it’s been going on since the beginning of time; it’ll go on till the end of time. Andor was just normalising the normal. That’s it.”
