Andor creator Tony Gilroy: ‘My Star Wars characters are based more on Trotsky than Trump'

Telegraph

23-04-2025

'They came to me with all these problems, but I said, 'Well, everybody dies. You keep that and everything can be fixed,'' explains Tony Gilroy, 68, when we meet in his London hotel room.
This is how the screenwriter, director and producer recalls the conversation with Lucasfilm when they brought him in to retool the 2016 Star Wars prequel, Rogue One, after its original director Gareth Edwards delivered a version they deemed unsuitable.
Despite its unpromising history, Rogue One is regularly voted the best Star Wars film outside the original trilogy, and its spin-off series, Andor – a prequel to the movie, following its reluctant revolutionary Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) – is almost universally acclaimed as the greatest of the Star Wars TV shows. But it, again, nearly ran aground, with an early concept – developed first by current chief creative officer of Disney Animation, Jared Bush, then The Americans show-runner Stephen Schiff, and featuring Cassian plus battle droid K-2 solving adventures every week – also considered off-the-mark.
Gilroy was again flown in, and suggested they focus instead on taking Cassian from 'cockroach to butterfly.' They agreed… but then, by his account, he almost sunk the series himself.
It was in this very room, he recalls, that the first season was saved by a 4am phone call telling him to flee the country.
'That was the last flight out as Covid hit,' he nods. 'But it saved the show. It's shocking how ignorant I was about the scale of what we were doing at the start. Really vaingloriously dumb. We had a writers' room, I was directing, budgeting and casting, all the while with this terrible anxiety that I had ruined my life. I was waking up every day going, 'Oh my God, what have I done?' Covid reset the whole table.'
Grounded in Hollywood, and now with more thinking time and a fresh perspective, he tore up scripts and started organising a new team. 'I turned into a cockpit creator,' he grins. 'I started doing meetings on Zoom, which really helped me remember everyone's names.'
He hired British directors Toby Hayes, Susannah White and Ben Caron of Black Mirror, Generation Kill and Sherlock fame and recruited Chernobyl production designer Luke Hull. Lockdown's shifting restrictions even meant some UK locations were easier to shoot in – like the Barbican and Canary Wharf.
Gilroy cannot praise British craft enough. While Jon Favreau shot The Mandalorian in a Volume (a 3D special effects studio), New York-born Gilroy preferred sets and building whole villages and towns at Pinewood… and the quality of the 400-odd speaking-part actors.
'Another American show-runner said, 'You're going to be a pig in s--t with actors',' he grins with delight. 'British directors won't hire them because they've been on EastEnders or did a TV commercial, but the talent pool here is sick. People show up on time, know their lines, and respect what they do.'
It was, he says mournfully, old-school shooting. 'I don't think they'll make TV shows like this in the same way ever again,' he sighs. 'I watched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly where Clint [Eastwood] comes up to the prisoner camp in the desert with 700 extras and I got so sad. Can you imagine the social life on set for that month? What a gas it was to be there? No one's ever going do that again. You'd tile the crowd. You'd CGI the set. All that fun is gone. I just don't see anybody doing a show like this on that scale again.'
As with Rogue One, Gilroy brought a brutal reality to the Star Wars universe, and has said that Cassian was based on Stalin.
'Irony doesn't work in print,' he sighs, when I bring that up. 'What I meant was, why did Lenin like Stalin so much? Because he was an earner. He brought the money. With Andor, I'm basically using history to explain the buffet of contradictions that are in a rebellion. The French Resistance is a Rebel Alliance of Gaullists and Communists and the Maquis, and you know they'll all kill each other the moment it's over. That's what Andor is about – how great powers build alliances of people who hate each other.'
Part of the joy of his work is his eye for this hatred in everyday life, no matter how extreme the circumstances. In season two he luxuriates in it. Divided into four mini-movies of three episodes, each chunk covers a year between the end of the first season and the start of Rogue One.
It's hard to discuss without spoilers, but… Inept Imperial Security Bureau agent Syril (Kyle Soller) is buffeted around by his superiors who use him as bait in the Empire's deadly scheming. Denise Gough 's ambitious ISB true-believer Dedra attempts to root out Rebels with mixed success. Luthen struggles to keep things together as his schemes become too tangled. Everyone is warring as much with their own side as their enemy. And, beautifully, everyone has to deal with jobsworths and tech desks who chatter away self-importantly about 'not sitting there if I were you,' or 'I need a location to follow the signal… sir.'
In Star Wars, prequels can be dangerous. Fans revere the lore, despite its staggering inconsistencies, and they dislike innovation. If you want a rabbit hole to fall down, Star Wars fans complaining is infinite.
'The thing about the Star Wars community is they all disagree on everything and the moment they stop chewing on you, they start chewing on each other,' shrugs Gilroy. 'My mandate is to be rigorous, and we've cleaned up some canonical messes, but with this show we've effectively made eight Star Wars movies. We're responsible for as much canon as anybody. Some people have a problem: 'It's not for kids. There aren't enough creatures in it.' Well, I don't make that show. Sorry.'
This makes sense when he talks about his early years. The son of a sculptor and writer, he grew up in small-town America, went to a school where academic excellence meant you'd be bullied, and left home at 16 – 'I loved my parents, but I got out of there as fast I could.'
He dropped out of Boston University to make it in a band and spent a few years moving coast to coast working in bars and playing gigs, trying to write novels and knocking out a screenplay purely to make some money. He found, to his surprise, he was good at it. His main two opponents, he says, are authority and himself.
'I really hate repeating myself, and my anti-authoritarian instinct is always there,' he laughs. 'It's a curse. I'm old enough to know how to mask it, but my instinct is always to f--k with the thing and not do what I'm supposed to.'
He got hold of Stars Wars, dumped the merch and added the Russian Revolution and death. He tested Lucasfilm by writing episode one of the first season with Cassian in a brothel looking for his sister and killing cops. Season two's budget of over $290 million was another challenge – Gilroy asked for a boost to their $230 million, just as Disney was cutting budgets, saying he'd prefer to leave Andor as a stand-alone than deliver a cheap follow up. 'I was testing them all the time and they always said, 'Okay',' he shrugs.
Potentially equally testing has been the return of Trump to the White House. Has there any imperative from Lucasfilm to adjust the depiction of the Empire in light of a presidency that could be seen to mirror it?
'If I were you, I would ask me that question,' accepts Gilroy. 'But it was all written before that, and I honestly want the show to be timeless. My characters are based more on Trotsky than Trump. I'm fascinated by revolutions. If I tried to sell a movie script about a young revolutionary dying for the cause, no-one's going to back me. In fact, I'm trying to get a $40 million movie made right now; everybody loves the script, but they all say it's really original. So, I'm f----d. But if you tell it as Star Wars, you have a place to play.'
That said, is he now done with the Star Wars universe? 'You never say never, but I certainly hope so,' he nods as we wind up our chat. ' God, I hope so. Remember what I said about repeating myself? I'm more the revolutionary who just moves on, the troublemaker who keeps making a mess, then heads off to the next one.'