Tony Gilroy was barely on set for “Andor” Season 2. The series’ head writer and showrunner finished his scripts about a week before the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike began, forcing writers into a state of “radio silence.” When the strike ended and Gilroy returned to work, something amazing waited for him: 12 fully shot episodes.
“You’re always in the cutting room on a show, in a movie, and inevitably, you’re at the point where you say, ‘Man, I’d pay $50,000 if I could see my movie for the first time,’” Gilroy told IndieWire ahead of the show’s Season 2 premiere. “I got to watch all 12 episodes on the run with the freshest eyes I could ever imagine, and I got to watch it as the audience would see it.”
After binging the “rough, shaggy” cuts (an audience wishes — “Andor” will drop three episodes per week from April 22 through May 13), Gilroy was off to London for an editing bonanza. Two of the show’s three directors were still around, with four cutting rooms open, and editor (and brother) John Gilroy running from room to room oversee the other Gilroy’s copious notes. Gilroy described it as “the most exciting two weeks that I ever had on the show.”
“Andor” Season 2 is both a marathon and a sprint. Picking up four years before the events of “Rogue One” and “A New Hope,” each three-episode arc will cover three days in the lives of its rebel leaders — with a year in between each batch.
“It presented itself very quickly,” Gilroy said of the time-jumping season structure. “‘Oh, my God, when we come back, we should only come back for a couple days each time. It should be the most intense three days each time. … And it was one of those problem-solves that just kept energizing itself and then has this knock-on effect all the way through. It energizes the actors. It makes time. You get that, but you get to move, and you get to keep the show.”
Gilroy ran his writers room in the presence of executive producer Sanne Wohlenberg and production designer Luke Hull, who chime in as needed while “watching the show rise in front of them.” Then the writers split off — Gilroy writing Episodes 1-3, Beau Willimon on 4-6, Dan Gilroy on 7-9, and Tom Bissell on 10-12 (Ariel Kleiman directs 1-6, with Janus Metz on 7-9 and Alonso Ruizpalacios on 10-12). There was “negative space” between the episodes, but Gilroy insisted that they avoid over-explaining it between blocks.
“I did not want to have the opening scenes of every year later block to be, ‘Since last I saw you,’ ‘And you cut your hair,’ ‘And now you’re a doctor’ — I did not want to have all the sort of ‘Let’s get this out of the way,; Chekhovian exposition,” he said. “There’s a couple places where the actors really need to know what happened. There’s a couple places where we really need to know what happened, the people making up the story. But by and large, what we’re leaving in the middle, we know.”
He points to a moment in which something big has happened in a mission off-screen, but the audience hasn’t seen it — and never will. “The controversy between them and that dialogue lets us fill in all the blanks,” Gilroy said, while noting that his door was always open for the show’s team to reach out for details.
Gilroy regularly runs into fans of his work on the street, receiving words of affirmation for “Dolores Claiborne,” “Michael Clayton,” “Devil’s Advocate” — the list goes on and on. He chuckled when he shared how often those interactions end in some version of, “What’ve you been doing?”
“Doing? I’ve been on a crusade,” he said. “I’ve tried to tell people, it is the biggest, most important thing I’ll ever get a chance to work on. It is absolutely my best work. I’m really proud of it. And if you want your $19 back, money back guaranteed — well, I’m not doing that, but that’s my pitch.”
The first three episodes of “Andor” Season 2 start streaming Tuesday, April 22 on Disney+.
