Faye Marsay compares acting on Star Wars: Andor to Game of Thrones

Star Wars: Andor is the best Star Wars spinoff show since The Mandalorian, and certainly the one that takes itself the most seriously. That’s not necessarily a good thing in and of itself, but watching Andor carefully guide its characters through a complicated plot has been pretty thrilling, especially when I expected more of a standard spaceships-and-blasters kind of action story. Instead, we’re getting a look at the banal cruelty of the Empire and the beginnings of the Rebellion as seen through the eyes of a large cast of complex characters.

One of those characters is Vel Sartha, a Rebel leader who was recently revealed to be the cousin of Imperial senator Mon Mothma. She’s played by Faye Marsay, who Game of Thrones fans may recognize as the Waif from the House of the Black and White; she’s the other Faceless Man who formed a rivalry with Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) in seasons 5 and 6. Arya eventually killed the Waif, but Marsay’s career was just getting started.

“Yes, that small show, yeah,” Marsay joked about Game of Thrones when speaking with /Film. “With Game of Thrones, I don’t know what it was about that, I just remained cool, because it was something that was so much bigger than me. What I was being asked to do was the thing that I like doing. If you minimize your role down, and you don’t worry about all the other sort of noise around it, you just kind of concentrate on what you’re being asked to do, which is quite… It’s not simple, but what my job is, is to say somebody else’s words convincingly and create a character that means something to the script, to the way the writer wrote it, and to the people who are watching it.”

"If you take all the noise out of it, I found Game of Thrones a much easier job than one would think. Given that, at the time, it was just blowing up, and given the storyline I had with the character, with Maisie [Williams], who was the most loved character pretty much on the show at that point, and I acted horrible to. So that was hard. But I think I probably felt more pressure starting a new huge mammoth Star Wars TV thing in which that I was going to be one of the sort of main-ish roles. Did I answer that correctly?"

Very much so.

Andor has aired nine of the 12 episodes from its first season. The show hasn’t been as widely viewed as some of the past Star Wars spinoffs like Obi-Wan Kenobi or The Book of Boba Fett, which is a shame, cause it’s excellent. Maybe the final three episodes will ramp things up and get people interested!

New episodes of Star Wars: Andor drop on Disney+ on Wednesdays.

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h/t ComicBook