StarWars.com take a look at a handful of the incredible amount of props made for the first season of Star Wars: Andor, utilising real-world items to make the hardware of the galaxy far, far away a reality. Prop master Martyn Doust walks Dan Brooks through these awesome items.
Cassian Andor’s Blaster
As the weapon of the series’ protagonist, designing and creating Cassian’s blaster brought with it an extra weight. “Straight from the very, very beginning, we knew we had to have a cool blaster for Cassian,” Doust says. “It had to be something iconic.”
He took initial inspiration from Han Solo’s DL-44, wanting Cassian’s weapon to be just as identifiable, even as a silhouette. “We tried lots of designs, we looked at how they built the original blasters in Star Wars,” he says. “We went deeper into the Expanded Universe of Star Wars, and we went all the way to the computer games.” That led the team to the K-16 Bryar pistol from Star Wars Battlefront, which they presented to Doust. “I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really cool,’” he says. He felt it could work – the K-16 looked great and it was small enough that Cassian could hide it. But there was one sticking point.
The front end, which gives the pistol its unique look, was big. For Doust, it was important to justify. “I had this idea that maybe it’s the fact that as you use a blaster in a gunfight, you pull the trigger, the blaster’s getting hotter and hotter and hotter, eventually it’s not going to work. And with a little flick of the wrist, this whole center section flips over and installs a new cool, cold barrel into the front end of the blaster.” Even better, the prop makers built this functionality into the actual prop.
“It would completely work,” Doust says. “Diego [Luna] became really great at flicking the wrist, very subtly hitting the button that controlled the mechanism that spun the barrel. You see him do it a couple of times in some of the scenes, and it’s just this nice little detail.”
