This story about “Andor” star Diego Luna first appeared in the Guild & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
“Andor,” the latest Star Wars series for Disney+ and a prequel to the 2016 big screen spin-off “Rogue One,” feels unlike anything that has happened in a galaxy far, far away. It’s a methodical and intricate look at how one man, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), becomes radicalized after spending a lifetime oppressed by systematically evil forces he once thought were too great to resist. His victories aren’t the flashiest and at the end of the first season he’s still a character in constant flux, but what an adventure and what a performance from Luna.
Luna, who also serves as an executive producer, had been on the project through previous attempts at a broadcast series from “The Americans” writer Stephen Schiff and “Glamour” director Jared Bush. But then “Michael Clayton” writer-director Tony Gilroy, who had helped reform “Rogue One” during lengthy reshoots, had the idea to make the characters more ambiguous.
“To understand who they are and what they are capable of, you have to go through the whole journey,” Luna said. “There’s no way you can go to an episode and say, ‘Okay, this is it, I get it.'” Gilroy, Luna added, is “the kind of writer who keeps surprising you. You can’t believe what you’re witnessing is about to happen, and then you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, how far is this going to go?’ And it goes further.” (Gilroy, in an earlier conversation with TheWrap, compared the creation of “Andor” to “building an entire civilization from scratch.”)
The series is also populated with fascinating supporting characters, including Andor’s adoptive mother (played by Fiona Shaw) and Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), a canonical “Star Wars” character given extraordinary depth and complexity. “I think it’s pretty unfair that the show is called ‘Andor,’” Luna said. “For the richness of the show, in terms of characters, context and stories.”
In Luna’s first conversation with Gilroy, the two agreed: “We’re going to be patient. A revolutionary is not formed by an event or by the words of a mentor. Things have to happen and you have to digest life in order to transform yourself”. The actor was sold. “By the end of that call, she was enamored with his opinion and the risk she wanted to take,” Luna said.
And risky it is. In many ways, “Andor” feels like an HBO show just streaming on Disney+, filled with morally nebulous characters, grandiose action sets, and problems our leading man can’t solve in a single episode. Fans and critics alike have been surprised and elated by what a big swing “Andor” is. And Luna has kept up with the response to the show, because even after “Rogue One” surpassed $1 billion at the worldwide box office, he suggested “there was a large section of the audience that wanted to see something different on the world of ‘Star Wars,'” he wanted people to embrace the new show “for the right reasons.” For him, those reasons are simple. “Yes, I love the action. I love the adventure. I love the sheer scope of the sci-fi that ‘Star Wars’ has. But when you really care about the characters that are in those action sequences, the action becomes huge in a way that money and effects can’t provide.”
Read more from the Guild & Critics / Documentary Awards edition here.
