Star Wars Andor Creator Reveals Show’s Five-Year Setup

The upcoming Disney+ series Andor will chronicle the five years that led to the events of the first Star Wars standalone movie, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Speaking to Empire Magazine at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim, where the show’s first trailer debuted, Andor creator Tony Gilroy explained the structure of the series. He says the scale of the story led to a block directing approach behind the scenes, leading into Season 2 applying a one-year-per-block structure, offering a chance to explore the motivations and character arcs that led to explosive occurrences in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. 

“The scale of the show is so huge,” Gilroy says. “Directors work in blocks of three episodes, so we did four blocks [in Season 1] of three episodes each. We looked and said, ‘Wow, it’d be really interesting if we come back, and we use each block to represent a year. We’ll move a year closer with each block. From a narrative point of view, it’s really exciting to be able to work on something where you do a Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then jump a year.”

He added that “Rogue One is more about an event than the actual journey of [the] characters. It’s quite amazing to start a show where it’s not about where we can end – it’s about, how did we end there?”

Gilroy previously spoke to ComicBook.com about the series’ timeline, explaining that they considered a five-season approach that may have allowed for the story to play out in real-time. “We always that it would be interesting to take somebody who was so accomplished in Rogue One, who has so many skills. He’s obviously a leader and he’s a seducer and he’s able of changing his mind and he’s creative and he’s he’s also soulful and he’s gonna give himself for the galaxy. And it was like, well, if you’re gonna start five years earlier, what’s the longest possible journey he could make? So we put him in a big hole when we start. So five years earlier, he’s a very different man. So watching you want to see people change.”

He continued, “Originally we thought, oh, maybe we’ll do five seasons, but it’s just the scale of the show is I think when the show comes out, everybody will forgive us for not doing that. This is the show is huge and it’s just physically impossible. So then we were like, what are we going to do? And then the answer turned out to be incredibly elegant and perfect. Which is because we knew where we wanted to go. Every now and then you get really lucky and the solution turned out to be really fortunate for us.”

Andor debuts on Disney+ on August 31st.