In a media landscape dominated by big franchises, studios seem keen to extend the life of popular films and TV shows for as long as possible. So the fact that a TV show as highly regarded as Andor will end after only two seasons seems surprising, but that’s the plan at Lucasfilm and Disney. That said, at first it was planned to run much longer.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, lead actor Diego Luna (Cassian Andor) and showrunner Tony Gilroy revealed that the original concept for Andor “was a five-season show, with each 12-episode season covering a year in the story” and that “both Gilroy and Luna initially signed on for that enormous commitment.” Luna said that a driving force behind this decision was realizing “how much I missed this job and missed this character.”
There was a real enthusiasm behind getting back into the boots of the morally ambiguous Cassian Andor, and exploring the backstory that drives him towards his role in the standalone film Rogue One. While Andor is named after one man, Luna thinks that it’s “unfair that the show is called Andor […] because it’s quite an ensemble piece” with a sprawling cast of characters. So there’s probably enough material for more than two seasons.
Star Wars: Andor was originally going to run for five seasons, was cut to two
But Luna and Gilroy share that once they’d shot five or six episodes of season 1, they came to decide that “they had agreed to an impossible plan.” The project was too vast, not to mention the difficulty of Luna playing “a younger man over the next 15 years” (bearing in mind that Andor takes place five years before Rogue One, a film which released in 2016).
Luckily for Gilroy and Luna, a solution to this problem presented itself. Season 1 is structured in such a way that it feels like there are four three-episode blocks (with each of those three-episode blocks led by a different director). So for season 2, Lucasfilm and Disney agreed that “each three-episode block will cover one year.” This way, all five years of buildup towards Cassian’s role in Rogue One will be accounted for, and Diego Luna will still be young enough to convincingly play the character.
Season 2 of Andor begins production in November, but for the time being fans can stream season 1 of Andor on Disney+.
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