Star Wars: Andor’s Tony Gilroy Reveals His Initial Pitch Was Rejected

The first three episodes of Star Wars: Andor are now streaming on Disney+, and fans of the franchise are excited to see Diego Luna back as Cassian Andor for the first time since Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hit theatres. Luna isn’t the only person from Rouge One involved with the new series. Not only is Genevieve O’Reilly back as Mon Mothma and Forest Whitaker back as Saw Gerrera, but Rogue One co-writer Tony Gilroy is serving as the showrunner. Gilroy recently had a chat with The Hollywood Reporter and revealed that his initial pitch for the series was rejected. 

“They tried to do a couple different versions of this show along the way. I wasn’t really interested, but the people that were trying it were feeling a little bit trapped in what we just discussed, this reverence for Star Wars,” Gilroy explained. “But they were also kind of inhibited because the economics weren’t really in place for large-scale streaming at that point. The economics to make a show like this, there wasn’t anybody who was going to spend that kind of money on a show. Now, there’s a bunch of aircraft carriers that are floating around; this is becoming a normal thing,” he added with a laugh.  

“But along the way, Kathy [Kennedy] sent me one of the pilots that they were thinking about, but had grown cool on, and she asked what I thought,” Gilroy continued. “And in some sort of … I don’t know. I had time. I was in some sort of manic thing, and so I just got on it for a couple days. So I wrote this big manifesto for her. ‘This is what your show should be like. This is what you should never do. This is why this doesn’t work.’ So it was a crazy thing, and it was wildly ambitious. And they were like, ‘Well, that’s really great. Thanks for helping us know what’s wrong, but we could never do this.’ Then they tried a couple other things, and when everything had gone cold, there was a moment where, my god, streaming was whoa. Now we can really do it.”

Gilroy added, “So they went back and pulled this old memo, and they were like, ‘We want to do this now.’ They wanted to be that ambitious on this scale, and the timing was right for me. I had a bunch of other things fall apart. I was getting a little tired of things falling apart, and the one thing that they definitely have is an audience. So it wasn’t an overnight thing that you tiptoe into. It takes a long time. Everybody tiptoes forward, but that’s how it came to be.”

Andor takes place five years before the events of Rogue One and has already been confirmed to have two seasons with the second season expected to go into production soon. In addition to the aforementioned actors, Andor also stars Stellan Skarsgård as Luthen Rael, Adria Arjona as Bix Caleen, Denise Gough as Dedra Meero, Kyle Soller as Syril, and Fiona Shaw as Maarva. 

The fourth episode of Andor drops on Disney+ on September 28th.