Star Wars: Andor Actor on the “Gray Area” of Imperial Syril Karn

Warning: this story contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Star Wars: Andor, now streaming on Disney+. “There comes a time when the risk of doing nothing becomes the greatest risk of all.” So says Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), Deputy Inspector for the Preox-Morlana, the corporate authority on the planet Morlana One. After thief Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) kills two Pre-Mor Authority officers while searching for his long-lost sister, the rigid Imperial leads a team of Corpos to hunt a Kenari male on the junker planet Ferrix. His target: the fugitive Cassian. 

“What attracted me to the role was [series creator and writer Tony Gilroy’s] writing,” Soller said during a recent press conference. “He had created a character that was really three-dimensional and had a big question mark over him. He could kind of go either way. He could go into the Empire. He could go into the Rebel Alliance. He’s got a lot of gray area.”

As Karn pursues Cassian across the galaxy, his mission will soon become a personal vendetta.

Karn “came from a place of such lack and such pain in his home life, that he’s trying to fill this void within himself through the fascist, corporate, bureaucratic structure, where he finds order,” Soller explained. “He finds a place to be seen if he can supersede his station and climb those ranks.”

Future episodes will introduce Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), an ambitious Supervisor with the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) who also has a score to settle with Cassian — and will stop at nothing to capture him. 

As scripted by Gilroy, Karn “was just a completely new character I’d never seen in Star Wars before,” Soller told ComicBook. “All these Star Wars characters are, they’re based on life, they’re based on archetypes, they’re based on things that we know from our own humanity.”

Soller added: “I think what Tony created with Syril and also Dedra [are] really three-dimensional kind of villains that are conflicted. Syril’s probably more conflicted than Dedra but those great villains in Star Wars, though, they live in the walls, I think, when you’re on the set anyway. So, they’re probably in there somewhere.”

Starring Diego Luna, Genevieve O’Reilly, Stellan Skarsgård, Adria Arjona, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller, and Fiona Shaw, new episodes of Star Wars: Andor are streaming Wednesdays on Disney+.