Disney+ series showrunner denies hit ‘Star Wars' show is a ‘left-wing' political story
'Andor' series showrunner Tony Gilroy said Thursday he does not believe his 'Star Wars' series is 'left-wing.'
In an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on his podcast 'Interesting Times,' Gilroy denied that he wrote the show to represent a left-wing revolution against fascist authoritarians.
Advertisement
'I never think about it that way. It was never- I mean, I never do. I don't,' Gilroy declared in response to Douthat asking if he agreed the show is a 'left-wing work of art.'
The second season of the critically acclaimed series debuted on Disney+ in April.
It follows the adventures of Cassian Andor, a key player in the rebellion against the Galactic Empire.
He was a main character in the hit 2016 movie 'Rogue One.'
Advertisement
The show, which lasted two seasons, provides a dark and realistic depiction about how individuals band together to resist a creeping authoritarian government that uses deception, censorship and violence to cement its own power.
4 The second season of 'Star Wars' series 'Andor' released on Disney+ in April. The cast of the 2nd season sat down for an interview on April 14th.
Getty Images for Disney
In the interview, Douthat said he believes Gilroy's depiction of the rebellion against the empire in the series is distinctly left-wing.
While introducing his guest, he said, 'The 'Star Wars' serial 'Andor' has somehow managed to pull off originality within the constraints of a familiar franchise, pleasing obsessive fans and critics alike. Part of its originality is that it has an explicitly political and, to my mind, left-wing perspective on its world, without feeling at all like tedious propaganda.'
Advertisement
Gilroy admitted the work was political in that it was inspired by his fascination with revolutions in world history.
4 Tony Gilroy (left) told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat that his show is not explicitly 'left-wing.'
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
'The canvas that was being offered was just a wildly abundant opportunity to use all of the nonfiction and all the history and all the amateur reading that I'd done over the past 40 years and all the things I was fascinated by, all the revolution stuff that not only I would never have a chance to do again, but I really wondered if anybody else would ever have a chance to do again,' he said.
Elsewhere, he told Douthat that he was particularly inspired by dictatorships throughout history, like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's regime.
Advertisement
'I want to pay as much attention to the authoritarian side of this, the people who've cast their lot with the empire, who get burned by it all,' he said.
4 The ''Andor' showrunner revealed the inspiration behind the show in an onstage interview.
Getty Images for Disney
4 Andor characters Alastair Mackenzie as Perrin Fertha (left), Genevieve O'Reilly, as Mon Mothma (middle), Stellan Skarsgard as Luthen Rael (right).
©Disney+/Courtesy Everett Collection
However, the showrunner denied he meant to portray the empire as a right-wing authoritarian government being undone by left-wing freedom fighters.
'But it's a story, but it's a political story about revolutionary ––' the conservative columnist protested.
Gilroy interjected, 'Do you identify with the Empire? Do you identify with the Empire?'
'No, I don't,' Douthat said. 'But I don't think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism. I see the Empire as you just described it: It's presented as a fascist institution that doesn't have any sort of communist pretense to solidarity or anything like that. It's fascist and authoritarian, and you're meditating on what revolutionary politics looks like in the shadow of all that.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Meghan shares video of family trip to Disneyland for Lili's fourth birthday
The Duchess of Sussex has shared another intimate video of the family celebrating Princess Lilibet's fourth birthday at Disneyland. The post on Instagram showed the family enjoying rides at the California attraction, drawing comparisons with Harry's childhood trip to Florida's Walt Disney World with Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1993. The montage also features a clip of Archie, six, and Lili meeting Disney princess Elsa, from the film Frozen. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (@meghan) Meghan wears a Minnie Mouse hat in some of the snaps featured in the video, while another image shows a two-tier Little Mermaid-themed birthday cake for Lili. The duchess captioned the video: 'Thank you @disneyland for giving our family two days of pure joy!' The footage was reminiscent of photos taken of the duke when he was eight and his mother Diana took him and William to Walt Disney World. At the time, the royal siblings were photographed sitting at the front of a log on the Splash Mountain ride, with adults from their mother's entourage behind them and Diana seated at the back. Meghan's post follows a number of family shots over recent days to mark Lili's birthday. In one, she posted a throwback video of herself twerking in a bid to bring on labour while pregnant with the princess, while another post featured a black and white snap of herself cuddling Lili. In another post, she described how Lili's relationship with Harry was 'the sweetest bond to watch unfold'. She shared two photos of the princess with her father the duke, adding: 'Daddy's little girl and favorite adventurer. Happy birthday Lili!' Lili – the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's youngest child – was born on June 4 2021 and was named Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor. Lilibet is named after her great-grandmother Queen Elizabeth II.
Fast Company
an hour ago
- Fast Company
5 mindsets on creativity to motivate anyone
Maggie Smith is a poet and a New York Times bestselling author of eight books of poetry and prose. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and many other journals and anthologies. What's the big idea? We are all creative beings because making your life is the ultimate creative act. For those who choose to tune their senses as artists, there are 10 key principles to improving your craft. The societal value of dedicating oneself to a life creating art rests in our essential human need for hope, healing, and a search for answers about our world and ourselves amid a sea of ambiguity. Below, Maggie shares five key insights from her new book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life. Listen to the audio version—read by Maggie herself—in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Creativity is our birthright as human beings. I think everyone is born a poet. Years ago, I agreed to visit my children's elementary school for a few days to talk to second graders about poetry and preparation. I got a sneak peek at the language arts textbook they were using in the poetry unit. The authors described poets as having a special ability to see the world in a poetic way. 'Poet's eyes,' they wrote, even suggesting that teachers wear an oversized pair of silly glasses during poetry lessons. On my first day, I told the kids that there's no such thing as poet's eyes. Every child is born with poet's eyes. We all have them. Poetry comes naturally to children because they haven't been estranged from their imaginations and their sense of newness in the world. As we age, we can become distracted and desensitized. We have to pay better attention, but more than that, we have to find ways to make the familiar strange again; to see the extraordinary tucked inside the ordinary. Poet's eyes are for all of us. After all, everyone is creative. Even if you don't make art, even if you're not a writer, photographer, or musician, you are creative every day in your work and in your life. Problem solving is a creative act. Conversations are creative. Parenting is creative. Falling in love, leaving your job, and changing your mind are all creative acts. Creativity isn't just about making art. Making your life is the ultimate creative act. 2. Attention is a form of love. What we turn our gaze to feels that warmth and light. What we dedicate ourselves to feels cherished. And conversely, what we ignore feels slighted, neglected, and devalued. This essential part of creativity requires no pen, no paper, no paints, no canvas, no nothing, only your awareness. Your hands can be empty, but your mind should be open. As I was thinking my way into how to write Dear Writer and talk about creativity in a way that makes it accessible for everyone, I sat down and made a long list on a legal pad. That list included words like curiosity, courage, trust, patience, gumption, improvisation, love, and so on. Looking at this unwieldy list, I started winnowing it down, prioritizing the terms that appealed most to me and seemed the most expansive. I eventually narrowed the list to 10 principles of creativity. 10 Principles of Creativity Attention Wonder Vision Surprise Play Vulnerability Restlessness Connection Tenacity Hope All 10 are essential, but attention comes first for a reason. I can't think of anything more important for a writer or artist than to be a sensitive, finely tuned instrument in the world. Keep your antenna raised. We need you to be all in. Life's everyday activities create static—a constant hum of responsibility, news, reminders, and encounters. Our work is to dial past that static to hear the quiet voice inside us. Some artists call this voice the muse. You can call it whatever you like. For writers, the quiet voice inside might whisper a line of a poem or a bit of description or dialogue, but that voice has things to tell us about our lives too if we tune in and listen carefully. The world is a complicated place full of both beauty and horror. But even when the world lets me down, even when it isn't what I want it to be, I find things to love and to be grateful for. I pay attention. My kids and I do our best to focus on beauty. In our house, it's not unusual to hear one of us shout, 'beauty emergency!' A beauty emergency is what we call something that stops you in your tracks, something you have to look at right away before it's gone. It might be a fiery pink and orange sunrise or an albino squirrel in the sycamore tree or snowflakes that seem to be falling in slow motion. If you take your time getting to the window, the sunrise might be pale peach. The white squirrel might be gone. The snow turned to sleet. Wonder is the opposite of cynicism. The wonder is the key here. There's no creativity without it. Wonder is the opposite of cynicism. It's warm and enthusiastic. While cynicism is chilly and bored, wonder is shushing everyone. Wonder says wow, and cynicism replies so what? Creativity requires us to pay attention and approach the world with wonder. Many of my poems were made possible only because I took the time to look at my surroundings: listen to the wind and the birds, touch leaves to know their textures, breathe deeply to describe what the autumn air smelled like. Being sensitive, attuned, and observant. These things don't just improve your writing. They improve your life. 3. Art changes us. Above all, I think we come to art to be changed. We come to books, films, music, and visual art to be expanded. Unzipped like a suitcase made larger on the inside, able to accommodate even more living. Creativity is the great expander. When you read a poem or listen to a song or watch a play, you are not the same person. Afterward, you're slightly rearranged. Your DNA is still the same. Your fingerprints are still the same. You look the same in the mirror, but you aren't exactly who you were. 'Be careful,' I might tell someone when handing them a book or a record, 'You will be different after this.' Years spent with art are years spent in cocoon after cocoon, always emerging changed. Books are community gathering spaces where connection is inevitable. When I read a book, I enter a place another writer has made. I can leave, but not entirely. I take the place with me when I go. Once a piece of art is inside you, it will continue to do its work on you for the rest of your life. Think about the music you listen to, the films you return to, how they move you, help you see things in a new way, or just make your day better. Imagine if those musicians, actors, artists, and writers never shared that work. You would be different. Your life would be smaller, less vibrant. Without their art, your life would be diminished without the transformation that their art made possible. 4. Every no makes room for a yes. Once upon a time, when I first began submitting poems to journals, rejections arrived in the mail. These days, it's usually an impersonal email that an editor selects from a dropdown menu in the journal's online submission system. Working for a literary magazine has helped me see rejection in a new way. I know how much stunning, worthy work is in that submission queue, and I know how little room we have to publish it. The decisions are sometimes excruciating. A no is a subjective no to one specific batch of work at one specific moment in time by one particular reader for a variety of reasons. A no is not a blanket rejection of you. It's not even a rejection of your work as a whole or your worth as a writer. It's not a no to your talent. Every no makes room for a yes. I tell my students that almost all of my poems were rejected before they found a home at a magazine. 'Good Bones,' my most famous poem, was rejected by the first few print magazines I sent it to before it was published by the online journal Waxwing. Those early rejections stung, but those early rejections were a gift. If 'Good Bones' had been published in print, it wouldn't have gone viral. Meryl Streep wouldn't have read it at Lincoln Center. It wouldn't have been featured on the CBS show Madame Secretary. It would have had a much smaller life. A no is not a blanket rejection of you. We are all playing the long game, and the only way to fail at the long game is to give up. We keep going and remember that sometimes failures clear a path for something better. 5. Creating is inherently hopeful. I think of each poem, each essay, each book I write as a message in a bottle. I don't know when I toss it into the waves, what shore it might wash up on, or when, or who might be standing on the shore to receive it. I don't know if they'll pull the message out or if they'll overlook the bottle altogether. If they do read it, I don't know what they'll think. Will they understand? Will they receive the creation in the way I hoped anyone would? To make things that don't exist yet and don't need to exist is the very definition of art, and to send them out into the world is wildly and practically and gorgeously hopeful in harrowing times. And what times have not been harrowing? Sometimes I ask myself, what can a poem do? A poem isn't a tourniquet when you're bleeding. It's not water when you're thirsty or food when you're hungry. A poem can't protect you from violence or hate. It can be difficult to create—to paint, to sculpt, to compose—when your work feels like it's not doing enough, when it can't do the real, tangible work of saving lives or making people safer. But art can do real, transformative work inside us. Think about art that has become an important part of your life: the songs you love, the books you treasure, the films you quote line for line. Art isn't extra. It's necessary. Art can do real, transformative work inside us. Art isn't life's decoration, but its framework. I know what some people would say: Wow, she really thinks being an artist is as important as being a doctor, a farmer, a firefighter. But I have been fed and healed and saved by art, by someone else's hope sent out into the world, when it washed up on my shore. This is not hyperbole. Art is essential. Our work as artists isn't to solve the world's problems, but to articulate the problems. Not to answer every question, but to use wild hope to ask and keep asking. Only by engaging with ambiguity can we make art that feels true.
New York Times
3 hours ago
- New York Times
How Stacy Spikes, Co-Founder of MoviePass, Spends His Day at the Theater
Stacy Spikes grew up at the movies. When he was a child in Houston, his mother would give him and his brother $5 each, drop them off at the theater — the manager knew them by name — and come back hours later. 'She'd probably be arrested today,' he said. 'It was a different time.' But that time at the movies was formative for Mr. Spikes, 56, who in 1997 founded Urbanworld Film Festival, a five-day festival in New York that showcases Black and multicultural films. In 2011, he co-founded MoviePass, a subscription-based ticketing service, which he later sold and then bought back in 2021. 'Seeing Disney films and being dropped off at the theater, that was a form of escape for us, but it was like our babysitter,' Mr. Spikes said. 'I saw 'Blade Runner' when I was 13 years old and I knew I was going to work in this area.' The movie industry has evolved in recent years, but Mr. Spikes remains a film buff. Recently, he saw 'Sinners' three times in three different types of theaters. 'I knew it had great music so I saw it the first time in Dolby Atmos, which focuses on the sound,' he said. 'The second screening, I saw it in IMAX, and now you're really focused on the picture and that part of the experience.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
