The second season of Andor is almost with us, and ahead of its release Tony Gilroy has been discussing the show with a variety of outlets including Gizmodo, where he went into the weeds regarding the characters of season one and how he views them. With season 2 completing the story with four, three-episode arcs added to the four arcs of the first season, Gilroy looked at the change from attempting a five season show to honing it into a two season, 24 episode, 8 chapter experience for fans.
“I would start with existence, for that’s the first one. It’s the only way it could possibly exist,” Gilroy bluntly joked when asked what the series gained in its transition from a five-season plan down to just two. “The hubris and naivete and stupidity with which I entered this process, we all kind of did. How are we going to do these five years? It was just impossible, absolutely impossible.”
For Gilroy however, the consolidation was ultimately a galvanizing one. “Once we got hit in the head with that, I actually think, and it sounds a little cheesy, but it’s the truth: if I was going to design this in a perfect world, I would spend one year on [Cassian’s] education and the transformation into a revolutionary. I think that one season really fits that way, and I would stick with what we did on the way out, because it just, energy-wise, it just, I don’t really have anything else to say about it. You’ll see how much we have to say about it. The narrative, I don’t want to say fun, but the narrative opportunity of telling a story where you drop in a year later, you leave all the negative space and you just hit like a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then you drop a year and come back for another three days, is so exciting.”
“It seemed like in the beginning we were like, ‘I don’t know, is this a cocktail napkin bar conversation that is going to turn out to be a bust?’,” Gilroy pondered. “In the end, it turns out to be just this really thrilling, again, saying it’s a challenge makes it seem more like a game, but it was just a gas to do it this way. I wouldn’t do it any differently.”
