We’re now less than three weeks out from the premiere of the second season of Disney+’s Star Wars series, Andor. Which is also the show’s final season—but not always, at least until Diego Luna’s face got in the way.
This is per series creator Tony Gilroy, who was talking to SFX about shifting plans for the sci-fi series, which tracks the evolution of Luna’s Cassian Andor from classic scoundrel into a hardened anti-Empire revolutionary. As originally conceived, that process was going to be a very slow one, with plans for a five-season journey that would have tracked a single year of the character’s life, counting down to his, ahem, final appearance in 2016 film Rogue One. And that stayed the plan, until the show was about halfway through shooting its first season, at which point Gilroy apparently looked around and realized he was kind of screwed.
“We were halfway through shooting season 1, coming through Covid,” Gilroy recalls, “And the monumental size of the show, the effort, and everything else was just dawning on us.” Time, and energy, both became a quickly apparent factor: “We realized that I didn’t have enough calories to do it, and Diego’s face couldn’t take the timing, because it just takes too long to make it.” (Gilroy’s being a bit poetic here, but we assume he’s talking basic practicalities: Andor started shooting in November of 2020, and didn’t reach Disney+ until fall 2022; even if the show could keep to that pace—which its strike-affected second season demonstrates it probably couldn’t—Luna would still have been at least 50 by the time the series wrapped.)
The show’s solution was, in Gilroy’s words, “born out of desperation”: The second season would instead truncate each of those remaining four years, with each of its four blocks of three episodes (which will release at a pace of a block per week starting on April 22) covering one of the years in question. (Luna’s previously said the show will basically be structured like four films, releasing sequentially.) “It’s a fascinating experiment,” Gilroy concludes, “And I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before. We’re going to jump a year between each block, and we’re going to use that negative space in a really interesting way, coming back for three days at a time.” As to whether this change of plans will leave the show feeling rushed in comparison to its sometimes slow-paced first season, well, that’s something we’ll all be finding out together later this month.
