The second and final season of Star Wars: Andor ended last week, with Cassian Andor walking off into the sunset and directly into the beginning of Rogue One, the 2016 movie that was so successful Disney let Tony Gilroy make a whole prequel show. Plenty of characters from Rogue One showed up in Andor, including the sassy droid K-2SO, Imperial officer Orson Krennic, and Cassian himself. But we never saw Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), arguably of the main character of that movie. The show ends with Cassian going off on the mission that will eventually put him in contact with Jyn. Together, they'll go on to steal plans for the Death Star.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Tony Gilroy said he never considered including Jyn Erso in Andor, although he did consider including Tivic, the rebel spy Cassian meets (and then kills) right at the beginning of Rogue One. “I always thought, ‘Oh my God, I'm going to have to deal with Tivic the spy!’” says Gilroy. “Should I deal with Galen Erso? And was there anybody else? I really thought I was going to have to use Danny Mays as Tivic. I thought, ‘Well, we probably should.’”
"In the end, I realized if people didn't absolutely have to be there, they shouldn’t. And it would've been lame to bring Jyn back as a cameo. That would've been really disrespectful in a way. I'd rather honor Rogue and keep it straight."
At one point, Andor was going to run five seasons instead of just two, which maybe would have given Gilroy more opportunity to bring in familiar characters. But to hear him tell it, the plan for the extended story was never workable. "I had no difficulty jettisoning the 60-episode concept," Gilroy told Vulture. "It was so unrealistic, and it wasn’t really a decision. It was, Oh my God, we’re completely fucked. What are we gonna do? I cannot express the naïveté and ignorance with which I entered this project."
It does sound like he would have run into problems. Consider Luthen Real, the uncompromising father of the Rebel Alliance. He's played by Stellan Skarsgård, who does a remarkable job bringing him to life. Apparently Skarsgård was only ever interested in doing two seasons. "When Stellan Skarsgård came onto the show in the very beginning and it was going to be five seasons or 60 episodes or whatever, he said, 'Hey, I’ll come on, but I’m going to come on for two years. You’ve got to promise me you’ll kill me at the end of two seasons.'" Gilroy remembered. "And I said, “You don’t have to put that in your deal; it’s just between us, but I’ll make sure I take care of that.” Promise kept.
The lost horror movie episode of Star Wars: Rogue One
Still, it's hard not to wonder what the show would have been like if it had more room to spread out. Speaking to EW, Tony Gilroy described a planned episode about K-2SO that was going to be "like a horror movie.”
“It was the K2 story,” Gilroy explained. “They had to bring this huge ugly tanker ship to Yavin, and there was a KX unit that was trapped inside there hunting. It was sort of like a monster movie with K2 on it. It was really cool.” But in the end, the idea wasn't workable. “We could not afford to do it. It was made clear that it was out of the range, so we had to abandon that and consolidate things.”
And then there were some cases where Gilroy tried to bring people back but it didn't work out, for whatever reason. "There are people — not important people, but you know, faces and presences in Yavin 4 from Rogue — who either didn’t want to come back because they were unhappy they didn’t have more of a part or were unavailable," he recalled. "We brought everybody back we could."
In the end, the first two seasons of Andor and the movie Rogue One make for a hell of a Star Wars trilogy. All of them are streaming on Disney+ now.
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