Star Wars: Diego Luna Explains the Timelime of Andor’s Season 2 Production

The first season of Andor recently came to an end on Disney+, but Star Wars fans won’t have to wait too long to see Diego Luna return to the titular role. Recently, fans celebrated the 6th anniversary of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which marked Luna’s first entry into Star Wars. Sadly, his character did not survive the film, which means the events of Andor are a prequel. The second and final season is currently in production and showrunner Tony Gilroy previously broke down the show’s timeline. In a new interview with Perri Nemiroff  (via Collider), Luna also talked about the show’s timeline and explained why he can’t continue playing Andor for too much longer.

“We didn’t want this to end up being an animated series,” Luna began. “I am who I am, and Tony Gilroy has to be the writer of this. We cannot be doing this for 10 years. Basically, the first season took four years. The second will take a little less, but he has to write 12 episodes. Then we have to go [into] pre-production. That normally takes six to eight months to build these places and to start with the whole process of designing, casting. Then the execution is another seven [to] eight months, and then post-production starts. That’s not easy either. So it’s a long journey. Each season takes three [to] four years of my life and of Tony Gilroy’s life.”

Luna previously shared with Collider, “[O]bviously at the beginning we said like, ‘It’ll be great to do five seasons.’ This was before COVID, long ago. But once we started, and we decided it was going to be this story this way, it was pretty clear that it would’ve been impossible to do five seasons of this. So Tony came with this amazing idea because we were already breaking it in blocks, in four blocks, four blocks of three episodes. That’s how we shoot. So each director gets three episodes and shoots that as a movie in a way. So Tony said like, ‘Well, if we’re missing four years, and we have four episodes, it could be perfect because it’s going to be like movies that would have a beginning and an end.’ Each year will have a beginning and an end, and it would be a chapter of three episodes.”

How Will Andor Lead Into Rouge One?

Gilroy previously broke down how the aim for Season 2 is to lead right up into the opening scenes of Rogue One.

“Well, it’s going to be the same tone,” Gilroy detailed to /Film. “It’s going to be hopefully the same quality, the same attention to detail, and all the rest of the things that people got used to. But there’s two things that are very distinctively different. One is that this is a show about [Cassian] becoming a revolutionary. His commitment to the cause is not going to be that much in doubt over the next four years. That’s the second difference. We’re going to be covering four years. Every time we do three episodes in the second half, we jump ahead a year. When we come back to the show for part two, it’ll be a year later. We’ll do three episodes, and then we’ll jump a year. Then we’ll do three episodes, and then we’ll jump a year on that. That last year will be the year that takes us into Rogue [One]. We have some pretty interesting storytelling opportunities. I’d be curious if anybody else has ever done it before. We can’t think of a [show] where someone did that.”  

The first season of Andor is now streaming on Disney+.