Star Wars: Andor Showrunner Says Series Appeals to Audiences Even if They Don’t “Give a Sh-t” About Franchise

Star Wars fans are less than a month away from seeing Diego Luna’s return as Cassian Andor in Star Wars: Andor. The upcoming series is expected to have two seasons and follow Cassian before the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote Rogue One, is serving as the showrunner for Andor. Gilroy recently had a chat with Variety and talked about some original ideas for the series and explained why there won’t be any “fan service.” In fact, Gilroy told the outlet that folks don’t need to be fans of Star Wars to enjoy the show. 

“You should be able to watch the show and not give a shit about Star Wars ever, or [have ever] seen any Star Wars,” Gilroy explained. “This show should work on its own.” He added, “The hope, the dream, is that the really hardcore Star Wars community will embrace the show in a new way — that they’ll be thrilled to have someone come in and completely uncynically get down molecularly in their world and treat it like a real thing.”

“I wanted to do it about real people,” Gilroy said of the show’s story. “They’ve made all this IP about the royal family, in essence. It’s been great. But there’s a billion, billion, billion other beings in the galaxy. There’s plumbers and cosmeticians. Journalists! What are their lives like? The revolution is affecting them just as much as anybody else. Why not use the Star Wars canon as a host organism for absolutely realistic, passionate, dramatic storytelling?” 

In another interview with SFX Magazine (via GamesRadar), Gilroy compared the series to The Bourne Identity. 

“[With Bourne] I had been trying to get people to make an acoustic action movie because action movies had gotten so bombastic in the ’80s, they were just enormous,” Gilroy revealed. “So when Bourne came along, we went way down to nothing. It was about making it real. Keeping someone you really understand and really care about in a place that you understand the geography of, with stakes, is much more involving than a guy on a train with 15 machine guns and a helicopter coming down. That aesthetic, that idea, does carry over to Andor because we are on the ground with these people so that everything that we do has an intimacy and an acoustic nature to it within the grandeur of Star Wars.”

Star Wars: Andor premieres on Disney+ on September 21st.