Rogue One Prepared Tony Gilroy To Follow Obscure Star Wars Rules In Andor
"Andor" has quickly featured a number of deadly important milestones for "Star Wars." Quite so, creator Tony Gilroy's hard-edged look at the birth of the Rebel Alliance not only marks the first time someone has uttered "s***" in a galaxy far, far away, but it's also the first "Star Wars" live-action movie or series to confirm that individuals in this universe do, in fact, need to pee. It turns out "Star Wars" people even have casual sex! (And here I was thinking it was solely those frisky midi-chlorians that were getting around.)
More than any other "Star Wars" project to date, "Andor" tends to concern itself with the minutiae of life among both the Rebels and Imperials, from their predilection for blue cuisine to their hygiene practices. (Also, is this the first live-action "Star Wars" title to show a person shaving? Because I think it might be.) It's all vital to Gilroy and his creative team's efforts to ground the series' fantastical universe in realism more than any other project this side of "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," which Gilroy co-wrote.
Gilroy's lack of reverence for "Star Wars" traditions has proven to be a boon to both "Rogue One" and "Andor," even if the "Bourne" films co-writer and "Michael Clayton" director still sees himself as a bit of an outsider to the whole enterprise. "I dunno. I wouldn't want to take the 'Star Wars' S.A.T.s," Gilroy told The Playlist's "The Rogue Ones: A Star Wars Andor Podcast" in September 2022. "I'd be like the guy who knows— like I only know this five-year period. There are five years that I curated, my five years. I got that down, but I would fail the S.A.T. on a lot of the rest."
'There are so many rules'
Luckily for Gilroy, he's surrounded by people who know their "Star Wars" trivia inside and out, like author and Lucasfilm head creative executive Pablo Hidalgo (whom Gilroy playfully referred to as residing "out in the Vatican"). "And so, if we have issues, we deal with that, and we figure out what we need," he noted. What's more, his experience working on "Rogue One" very much helped prepare him for "Andor" when it comes to following the unspoken and otherwise obscure "rules" of "Star Wars." Gilroy explained:
"It started on 'Rogue.' There are so many rules, 'Oh, you can't have paper; you can't have wheels. You can't have knives.' You can't have all these different things. Well, there are all kinds of things that we have, and we've made an enormous amount of canon, not violating canon, but we've made an enormous amount of new canon in this show. So right, I've got my 'Star Wars' merit badge on."
By breaking the "rules" for what you can and cannot feature in any "Star Wars" project, Gilroy and his fellow creatives have not only enriched the storytelling in "Andor," they've also made it possible for a wider variety of "Star Wars" stories to be told in the future. So, for all those who've been dreaming of making a mockumentary about stormtroopers in the vein of "The Office" or a whodunit featuring Gungans (not that I would know anything about that...), you can take comfort in knowing that you, too, might one day get to redefine what does and does not fly in a galaxy far, far away.
New episodes of "Andor" premiere Wednesdays on Disney+.