Andor’s Tony Gilroy Gives Interview He Couldn’t Before

On the subject of clairvoyance, Gilroy downplays such a notion for the simple reason that he based his Emmy-winning series on historical records. 

“You get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible,” GIlroy tells The Hollywood Reporter. “How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism.”

Fascism is a word that Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from saying during the earlier promotional phases of Andor’s spring 2025 release. When one considers how much energy is devoted to generating political outrage, it’s understandable why the studio would not want the marketing of its most decorated series to be overshadowed by such noise. Bear in mind, they had just put out their live-action remake of Snow White, which conservative media used as a culture-war punching bag for nearly four years.

“The actors have a broad spectrum of political ideas, and we didn’t want anybody to perjure themselves or violate their conscience. So we came up with a legit historical model,” Gilroy says of Andor’s promotional message. “It was a very, very safe and legitimate place for us to sell the show without ever having to say what I’m free to say now.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Gilroy sounds off on the current direction of the United States in relation to Andor. Then he addresses the recent report — one that was quickly denied — that the new co-president of Lucasfilm, Dave Filoni, was not a fan of his series.

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Sagrona. 

Sagrona teema!

So this is the interview you couldn’t really give during the run of Andor.

Yeah, we never were overtly misleading, but we were being delicate.

You devoted nearly a decade of your life to making Star Wars …

Oh God, don’t say it like that. (Laughs.)

Well, when you finally put it in your rear-view mirror and started making a movie called Behemoth!, real life, as it’s done before, eerily mimics numerous story points in Andor. Can you take me through your thought process as you’ve watched the reporting out of the Twin Cities? 

Well, on a human citizen level, it’s just an absolute gothic nightmare. The simplest answer to the strange synchronicity of all of this is really on them, the outside forces. We were pretty much doing a story about authoritarianism and fascism, and the Empire is very clearly a great example of that. It’s a great place to deal with those issues, and as we’ve discussed many times before, we had this wide open canvas to deal with it. 

So you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper. 

In the beginning, it was very confusing. People were like, “Oh, you’re psychic,” or, “The show is prescient.” But in the rear-view mirror, it’s really a much sadder explanation than that. 

Yes, you were inspired by history books, including the use of pretext. 

Yeah, it’s the same shit all the time. Get rid of truth, get rid of a free press, destroy communities, nationalize the businesses, find an arbitrary enemy that you can elevate and false flag them through propaganda. Flood the zone with as much gak and atrocity as you can so that nobody can pay attention to what just happened, and pray that you have an overwhelming majority of sheep that will follow you. It’s just tragically and sadly familiar. It’s on them; it’s not on us.

In Andor’s case, the Empire wanted a Ghorman mineral for their superweapon, and so they cultivated pretext for their occupation of Ghorman by blaming a local insurgency they empowered through Syril Karn (Kyle Soller). The current administration sent ICE and other related agencies to Minnesota to deport undocumented people. But in late January, the DOJ requested the state’s voter rolls, among other conditions, in exchange for a reduced presence. Do you consider the immigration crackdown to just be a pretext for larger election-related goals? 

Yeah, but I think it’s much more terrifying than that. I’m having a great deal of difficulty — and have had a great deal of difficulty over the past few months — just watching really smart, good people try to make sense of what’s going on by normalizing it in the slightest and trying to bring normalized conversations to this topic. I think the overall goal is to stop elections and to have a complete fascistic state. Any controversy that they can make and elevate to a hysterical pitch allows them to cancel elections or modify elections in any way they want. I think fair elections are what they’re absolutely after. 

But I think they’ve been stymied by their own stupidity. Fortunately for us, they have only a few of the pieces that you really need to take over. They have an incredible appetite. They have an incredible flood-the-zone ground game, but they have no narrative ability. They don’t really have a [Joseph] Goebbels or a Mike Deaver in there. They don’t have a presentation. They don’t have a Leni Riefenstahl in there. They do not have a way to get their message out in a narrative fashion. They’re terrible at that, and they’re never going to be good at it. 

So I don’t think they’re going to get over, but I think the ultimate goal was always to get rid of the elections completely and just do a complete takeover. I don’t see any other plausible endgame for them.

It’s the same playbook in Venezuela. Drugs and democracy were the pretext for regime change, but the first order of business was oil, not drugs or elections. 

Ghorman is Greenland. Ghorman is anything. “We want the rare earth, we want this.” It really is just a crude laundry list of moves that they have, and my earlier answer stands for the way it rhymes with the show.

The rush to control the narrative was also something you covered. Peaceful protesters on Ghorman were regarded as terrorists. The Ghor had no way to correct the Empire’s account because they didn’t have cell phone footage like the Minnesotans who countered the White House’s version of events. Mon’s big speech relates directly to this, as does the Ghorman senator’s line, “They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore. I suppose that’s the final humiliation.”

They don’t even care. They don’t even have to lie well. 

But even the objective reality that technology provides us is under threat from AI. Perhaps that’s a big reason why it’s being force-fed to us. It further eliminates truth and fragments our realities even more.

I’m not sure, and perhaps it will be the final fallacy that I’m living under. I completely lost my predictive powers years ago when Trump was elected the first time, and perhaps I’m still missing something fundamental. I used to think that I was really on top of this shit, but I don’t think they have that kind of game. Everyone’s wondering, “Why is Silicon Valley going along with all this? Why hasn’t anybody raised their hand?” And I think that there’s a much more terrifying tech reich that’s lurking in the background of all of this. That is actually sophisticated, and I don’t think the Trump people are in control of any of that. 

They might be hitchhikers — and they might have opportunistic reasons to be at the same banquet with those people — but I don’t think that they’re aligned with them in any way. I have a feeling there are some sleeping giants out there that are just looking at this as a really wonderful dormant moment to capture market share or just run wild with AI before anybody pays attention to what’s really going on. 

It becomes part of the cascade of failures. “Let’s lose everything to China. Let’s get rid of all of our vaccines and get sick.” To walk away from the opportunities of climate change is the classic one, because climate is the big moneymaker. China is going to make all the money on it now, and we’re just letting that go because we have a business president who’s on coal. He might as well be out going for whale oil. It’s like, “What the fuck?” It’s really extraordinary how many fundamental things are wrong. 

The perfect president and the perfect monitoring of AI and the perfect global summit meetings would’ve gathered like-minded governments together to say, “Hey, how much trouble are we in? What’s going to happen to the labor force? What’s going to happen to society because of AI?” But none of those things are going to happen now, and we will suffer for it.

I do know that the Biden Administration had some form of guardrails in place that were quickly rescinded by the Trump Administration. That was part of their half-a-trillion-dollar investment in AI data centers. 

Yeah, I think that there were people in the Biden administration who were really struggling to understand it and get their arms around it. I know there’s a lot of people in Europe that are really thinking about it, but I’m not sure it can be contained. It’s terrifying every time I look at it, and it changes so much, month to month, that it’s very difficult to figure out. But could there be a worse bunch of clowns in charge of it right now? No. You couldn’t set the bar any lower than where it’s being set in Washington right now.

Any video of Renée Good and Alex Pretti’s shootings in Minnesota had numerous, “Is this real?” comments underneath them. It’s chilling that we’re already questioning everything we see.

It’s a terrifying, mysterious future that’s approaching, and we just don’t have time to think about it because we’re so underwater worrying about all this other unnecessary shit. This is a sidebar, but all the guilds are starting their labor conversations now, and I wish I could say that the guilds have a really good handle on AI after all the research they’ve been doing.

We’ll probably never fully find out about the Cassian, Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) and Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau) types who are working behind the scenes to protect democracy, but among the democratic politicians, do you see enough Mon Mothmas and Bail Organas rising to the occasion? 

To be an effective leader, you have to have both skill sets. You have to be a problem solver who’s curious, empathetic, progressive, involved and sophisticated. That includes a pretty wide ideological spectrum, from center, center-left and center-right. I respond to people that are empathetic technocrats in a way. I really like proper problem solving, and I don’t really like doctrinaire ideological answers.

Beyond all that, I yearn for storytellers, and I yearn for people that communicate. I’m always frustrated by politicians that I really like when they can’t get their messages out. The Biden White House had a great story to tell, but they never had a messenger or any way to sell it whatsoever. The Obama White House, in the end, the postmortem on that was some poor messaging about what was going on. I just think that messaging is really overlooked. Controlling the narrative is really valuable. The progressive politics and democratic politics and sensible politics have really failed in great measure by not having really good stories to tell and not telling them properly.

Yeah, there are plenty of democratic leaders who are not meeting the moment. That was another point you illustrated, whether it was through the infighting among Rebel cells, or the red tape the Rebel Alliance put in Cassian’s way. 

We literally tried to get every aspect of that experience in there.

Then there’s all the parallels to Narkina 5. Cassian was sent to that prison unlawfully, and there have been numerous stories about people who’ve been wrongfully detained in ICE detention centers. I know you’ve answered the prescience question at length already, but I just want the readers to be reminded of all the items you accounted for in the show. It must be conflicting to hear it all laid out. 

We’re proud of the show. God, we’re proud of the show. That’s our sustaining takeaway. We were stunned [about the prescience] for a while, but we’ve really gotten to the point where it’s really sad. It’s just sad how predictable and lame and obvious and wrong it all is. Fascism is just a total fail in the end. It eats itself up in the end. So this will have been an incredible waste of time, an incredibly wasted opportunity and an incredibly dark period in America’s history that it may never recover from.

You were quoted as saying, “Fascism doesn’t just take down the oppressed. It doesn’t just come for the people it’s trying to control. It inevitably destroys the people who have worked the hardest to build it.” And we’ve seen some notable examples of that recently. 

Yeah, it’s really interesting to watch the moment of realization where they’re suddenly cast off the island. Just read a little deeper into your Fascism for Dummies book, and go to the last chapter to see what’s going to happen.

You said not too long ago that you couldn’t use the words fascism and genocide during early promotion of the show. And I do understand where the studio is coming from in not wanting the promotion of a show to be overshadowed by outrage media. James Gunn referred to Superman as an “immigrant,” and conservative media pounced on it to no end. Did you have a hard time talking around the show you made? 

We didn’t. Diego [Luna] and I had some early, super long-lead press, and we tiptoed out. We were like, “Oh my God, this is really electric.” So we stepped back, and we had a bunch of people that we were going to put on the road to sell the show. The actors have a broad spectrum of political ideas, and we didn’t want anybody to perjure themselves or violate their conscience. So we came up with a legit historical model, and it’s a version of what I’m telling you now. “We studied history to make the show, and we based it on historical models. We don’t have a crystal ball. There’s comps for everything that we did all through history.” So that was a very, very safe and legitimate place for us to sell the show without ever having to say what I’m free to say now. 

Kathleen Kennedy has left the Lucasfilm building. You’ve stated many times that Andor’s success wouldn’t have been possible without her backing your play, economically and creatively. The obvious takeaway here is that there’s an appetite for Star Wars to be bold. But based on Kathy’s exit interview with Deadline, the studio seems hesitant to take on riskier projects she championed, including one from your friend Steven Soderbergh, and another from your Andor writer, Beau Willimon, and James Mangold. Will you be disappointed if Andor doesn’t yield more mature stories and is forever the outlier in the Star Wars catalog?

Disappointed would be too strong a word. What would I feel? I don’t know. I’m not an investor. I don’t have the responsibility. I don’t have that portfolio on my desk. I don’t know how I would behave if it was my ass on the line and there’s X amount of money. The problem is there’s no inexpensive way to do these shows [or movies]. I’m watching the [Games of] Thrones spinoff now, the low-key, the low-fi one [A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms]. It’s very refreshing in that it’s so nice and down there.

But I don’t know what it would be like to make those decisions, and I don’t know if I’d be disappointed [if Andor is a creative outlier]. If I was going to do that job, I would rather go down swinging. I’d rather go down in flames. As low-risk as my life is, my creative life is pretty high-risk, so I’d like to swing away. Safety has never been one of my navigational principles. But disappointed? It doesn’t matter to me what they do. I wish them luck. I really do.

Dave Filoni is now co-running Lucasfilm with Lynwen Brennan. He’s a George Lucas protégé who’s known for being a Star Wars purist. I asked him a few years ago what he thought of Andor, and he had nothing but praise for your work. Adjectives like “brilliant”, “fantastic” and “great” were used. However, The Wrap recently reported that he wasn’t a fan of Andor, something Lucasfilm immediately denied. Did you ever sense any creative or philosophical disagreement from Filoni? 

No. We’ve only met a couple times, and we’ve only had a half-a-dozen conversations over the last ten years. Seriously. I saw Jon Favreau at a scoring session once. We’ve always gotten along with those guys, and we’ve never had anything but high praise for everything that they’ve done. We only have our show because of them, and we’ve always said that was true. There’s no Andor without The Mandalorian. It would not exist. So it has never been anything but cordial and pleasant, ever, ever, ever, ever. I don’t know anything that you don’t know. I really don’t.

You had a very rewarding experience developing Andor’s score with your neighbor Nicholas Britell and eventually Brandon Roberts. Did those collaborations spark your upcoming movie about a composer in some way, shape or form?

No, but it’s part of it. My obsession with music started much longer ago than that. I started playing in bands when I was 11, and I had some fantasy at some moment in my life of being a studio musician, which was a very quickly dashed notion. I was way into it. And then the moment I started directing, I was way into the scoring and the music. When we were doing the score for Rogue [One] on that Sony stage with the huge orchestra and [composer] Michael [Giacchino]. I was just like, “Man, there’s got to be a movie here. There just has to be a movie here.” 

I did a lot of research on it, and it was happy research. I’m never happier than when I’m dealing with music. But I couldn’t find a hook for the movie. And while we were doing Andor, I was increasingly activating the musical part of myself that is such a happy place for me. So I kept wishing I could figure out how to do this movie, and I didn’t find the hook for it until we were wrapping on Andor. I finally found a hook, a way to do the movie. So Andor was a finishing school in scoring, for sure, because it’s 20 hours of music. I learned a lot from it, but all it did was increase my enthusiasm to try to get Behemoth! made.

I heard that a bunch of notable composers are contributing music to it. Are Britell or Roberts involved? 

There will be nine composers all in. Nick is not one of the nine, but Brandon is doing a cue. We’re cooking it downstairs now. We’re just starting to edit.

You haven’t directed since 2012’s The Bourne Legacy. How long did it take you to get your sea legs back on set? 

That’s a really good question. It’s daunting. When you’re showrunner, you’re too busy and too powerful to even direct. But when the set becomes your set, suddenly it’s like, “Oh man.” It took a few days to feel comfy in it, but I don’t know if you should ever get too comfortable as a director.

I have one nitpick regarding Andor season two. 

Go for it! 

I just wish that Bix (Adria Arjona) got to go on a full mission with Cassian. I keep imagining her as Varian Skye’s muse. Were there any budgetary limitations that prevented such a scenario?

No, but there are other things that we did for budgetary reasons. I put a [Bix and Cassian mission] off screen. In the first scene at the safe house [in 204], they’re talking about a mission they just came off of where he killed somebody who saw their faces. So often in films or whatever, it’s not what you want to say; it’s where you can say it. Where’s the opportunity to do it? It certainly would’ve been fun and easy to write interesting things for them to do together, but where do you put it? How does it fit? What’s its application? So it happens to take place off screen in the year before the Coruscant safe house.

In closing, do you have any parting words as the Andor chapter of your life concludes?

We did our last guild Q&A last night with [writers] Tom Bissell and Danny [Gilroy]. We’re really at the end of talking about it. They’re putting together a coffee table book, The Art of Andor, and they asked me to write a foreword for it. I had a whole bunch of homework while I was doing the movie, and I kept looking at it, going, “What is this?” So I finally opened the book, and I was like, “Oh my God.” I wasn’t just incredibly nostalgic. Every page has ideas that we talked about over the course of a million meetings, and it’s just so good. The whole thing was just so overwhelming. 

In the foreword, I really leaned on how many people and how much insanity it took to pull our sled, and how cool and fun a process it was. A bunch of really talented people were encouraged to be as maniacal as they wanted to be for a long period of time. It really was a hive mind mania among [EPs] Sanne [Wohlenberg,] Johnny [Gilroy], Luke [Hull] and Kathy. So I’m proud of the way that we managed the company and all those thousands of people that worked on the show.

To be proud of the thing that you made in the end and have so many people respond to it, it’s really been such a pleasing chapter. I’m sorry to leave it behind, and I’m glad I have something else to distract me so I don’t have any major post-project letdown.

Seeing your brother Dan accept his writing Emmy for “Welcome to the Rebellion” must’ve been another prideful moment.

It was, yeah. All that stuff is good. But looking to awards for affirmation, I’m old enough now, and I’ve been through it enough, to know that it’s just not good for you. If that’s where you’re going to get your value, then you’ve missed the point. It would really be a shame to be as old as I am and to have that be a motivator. As silly and trite as it sounds, it really is about the process. If you’re not enjoying it while you’re doing it along the way, you’re missing the train.

So I’m not sure if we’ll ever see something like Andor again — made live, not by AI. Will someone ever spend that kind of money to make something live again [on streaming]? I don’t know if that will ever happen again, but what a great thing it is to be able to have done it. We got away with it, and we feel pretty good about it.

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