Anyone else feeling like we could use some inspiration for an overthrow? Well according to creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, “Andor” Season 2 has you covered. Speaking in a recent interview with Empire, Gilroy laid out a few of the questions swirling around his head as he went about conceiving the next installment of the series, all of which speak to the challenges his characters face and how the audience will interact with them.
“What is the real effect of time — pressurized, painful time — on ordinary people that hopefully you care a lot about?” Gilroy said. “What happens to their love affairs? Their relationships? Their homes? Their children? What happens to everything around them, if you’re thrust into this vice-grip of revolution? Those are the big tectonic moves of the second season.”
Though Season 1 saw small moments of revolution spread out across multiple episodes, Gilroy believes Season 2 fully embraces it. Just as Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) comes into his own, using his skills to become the “spy-war-fighter” he hesitated being initially, so too must Lutheran Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) own his real objectives rather than shroud himself in mystery.
“Now, all of a sudden, he’s going public,” said Gilroy. “What do you do if your currency is privacy and secrecy, and failure is death? How do you scale up? How do you play with others? How do all the disparate pieces of the Rebellion come together in [Rebel base] Yavin?”
During an interview last month with Collider, Gilroy pointed out that his inspiration in dealing with these revolutionary themes don’t come from any prescience he has in regards to current affairs, but rather an overall awareness for how history is made.
“No one was working on the show with a newspaper at any point in time. We write so far in advance,” he told Collider. “I’ve said this before: I’ve been a student of history, as an amateur, a dinner table historian all this time, and it’s nothing but revolutions and uprisings and people being swept up into events that they weren’t ready for and people assuming heroic roles that they had never anticipated.”
“Andor” Season 2 premieres on Disney+ Friday, April 25.
