Yahoo News Diego Luna and Tony Gilroy tease Andor season 2 time jumps and the 'responsibility' of ending Cassian's story
Even before Andor premiered, we've known how it's going to end. Series creator Tony Gilroy and star Diego Luna have repeatedly said that their Disney+ Star Wars show will conclude right before the events of Rogue One, setting up how Cassian (Luna) embarks on that fateful mission to steal the Death Star plans. Now Andor is slowly making its way to that destination, as the second and final season will premiere in August 2024.
Gilroy and Luna spoke to EW's Dagobah Dispatch podcast at Star Wars Celebration in April, where the pair opened up about the "responsibility" of getting season 2 right. Knowing how the story ends, they insist, is not a spoiler. After all, what's that old adage about the journey being more important than the destination?
"The beauty of this show is that even though sometimes you know what's going to happen, it hits you as though you're learning it for the first time," Luna tells EW. "You are witnessing this from the inside, from the personal perspective. You get to live it with the characters, or through the characters. Therefore, it hits you differently. It's not about the events, necessarily, but about the choices made and the risks these characters are taking. It's because you know them that you care like you didn't care before."
©2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM Diego Luna as Cassian Andor on 'Andor'
If Andor season 1 was about the birth of the Rebel Alliance, then season 2 will explore its growing pains. Gilroy says he was particularly interested in how a revolution can go mainstream — and how diehard freedom fighters like Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard) might fit into that.
"If your business is based on paranoia and secrecy and death, how do you expand your business?" Gilroy adds. "How do you go public? How do you go wide? The Rebel Alliance that emerges on Yavin, it's almost like the Christian Democrats: It's a consolidated compromise group. But what happens to all the original gangsters and the hardcore people who built that road? What happens to them, and how do they integrate with that?"
Andor season 2 will also span several years, and Gilroy says there will be four time skips, each covering about a year. The second season will be split into multi-episode blocks, and the first jump comes between the season 1 finale and the season 2 premiere. It's an ambitious approach, but the key, Gilroy says, is to tell that story "without doing any of the awkward exposition."
"That's the bar we set, and that's the game we're playing," the writer adds. "We think we figured out how to do it. [We have] a responsibility to the characters we've set up and launched into this world and their trajectories. Our responsibility is to bring it home efficiently. But mostly, it's to pay off emotionally and stick the landing."
For more from Luna and Gilroy, listen to the latest episode of EW's Star Wars podcast, Dagobah Dispatch.
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