Andor dials back the clock

This latest Star War series takes fans back to its rebellious past, writes Michael Idato.

Of all the qualities that have come to define Disney’s Star Wars television shows, what stands out is the effortless way they weave in and out of the established canon.

A show like Andor may feel relatively new, but characters such as the famed rebel leader Mon Mothma, take us back to the Star Wars an older generation grew up with.

Genevieve O’Reilly, the IrishAustralian actress who plays Mon Mothma, seems to conjure the regal power of her predecessor, actress Caroline Blakiston, who played the character almost 40 years ago in the third chapter of the ‘‘original trilogy’’ – Return of the Jedi.

In the new series Andor, the younger Mon Mothma appears in the infancy of the Empire, as an influential senator helping to build the foundations of what will become the good guys of the entire Star Wars saga, ‘‘the Rebel Alliance’’.

And O’Reilly’s task – taking on a part played previously by another actor – is not new to Star Wars. Ewan McGregor was tasked in the film prequels and the television series Obi-Wan Kenobi with the job of playing the younger Sir Alec Guinness. While it runs contrary to an actor’s nature to simply imitate, McGregor has said he had to let Guinness’ performance in. O’Reilly agrees.

‘‘Caroline Blakiston is always there,’’ says the 45-year-old. ‘‘I’ve played this character in different iterations over the last number of years, but I always go back to Caroline’s performance in Return of the Jedi at the very beginning. I don’t go back to it too often, but at the beginning, before I start my work, I go back to her.

‘‘Caroline originated the character, and she created something really special with not very much [scene time],’’ O’Reilly says. ‘‘She had such a weight to her. There was a pain at her core. And yet, she was this really iconic leader, female leader, and I feel like I have a responsibility to the character and also to Caroline and to George Lucas who created her all those years ago.’’

In a sense, the notion of Mon Mothma as a great female leader is impactful, but it owes an almost immeasurable debt to the earlier work of

Carrie Fisher, whose performance as Princess

Leia Organa, the senator of Alderaan captured by Darth Vader in the original 1977 film Star Wars, was dazzling. Princess Leia was, for many, the original female action hero.

‘‘You can’t underestimate the impact that Carrie Fisher’s portrayal of Princess Leia had on modern cultural cinema and storytelling,’’ O’Reilly says.

It is a debt owed by several key female parts in the Star Wars cycles, not just Princess Leia and Mon Mothma, but also Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) and Rey (Daisy Ridley).

‘‘They’re quite different, but they are women who are on the battlefield,’’ O’Reilly says.

‘‘For Mon Mothma, her battlefield is the senate. She is a voice for diplomacy. She is a voice for political solution. She is trying to affect change within a very male-dominated, empirical structure. She is trying to use words. She’s trying to gather allies. She is trying to oppose an ever-looming autocracy. We know where it goes. We know it’s a wrestle. We know there will be massive pitfalls. We know it’s not going to be easy.’’

In that sense, O’Reilly says, Andor is an inherently political story, set in the shadow of the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire.

‘‘Each of the live-action pieces have their own identity, and this piece led by Diego [Luna] as Cassian Andor, who as we know

in [the film] Rogue One, I introduced him as, ‘This is Cassian Andor from Rebel Intelligence’, so we know this is a spy thriller. We know it is about espionage and political intrigue, but if you look at the trailer, it’s also unafraid to be explosive and gritty and dirty.’’

Critically, Andor dials back the clock. ‘‘There are touchpoints in Rogue One, snapshots for every character, little moments of truth of who they are, little pieces and shards that go back to who they were,’’ say writer-producer Tony Gilroy. ‘‘And the pieces that we had for Cassian were that he’d been in the revolution since he was 6 years old. He’d been fighting since he was 6 years old.

‘‘We know that at the end of [Rogue One], he says, ‘My God, if we don’t go out and make this final effort, then all of the things that I’ve done, all the horrible things that I’ve done for the rebellion, they’ll be for nought. It’ll be useless.’ So we know there’s a very dark period.’’

Gilroy says there were ‘‘tiny navigational points’’ in Rogue One that was built from to create Cassian Andor’s story. ‘‘It felt very important, particularly for a story where you’re taking somebody on a five-year journey, to really, really be fully invested in their complete story, from origin and, as we know in Rogue One, to the end,’’ he says. ‘‘So the responsibility to have an abundant, real, important backstory was obvious.’’

It was a gift to start with the conclusion of the story – the events of Rogue One, which dovetail into the Skywalker family Star Wars ‘‘trilogies’’ – and then map it backwards, says Gilroy. ‘‘This is about these huge titanic forces that are manipulating people’s lives, forcing them to make decisions. The story of revolution and what it means is very complicated,’’ Gilroy says.

‘‘By the time we get to Rogue One, what’s great about building this show back in reverse and seeing the preceding four years is that a lot of scenes in Rogue One are going to take a deeper significance and a deeper resonance. That is not a happy moment for him. But there are so many things that will have been sacrificed along the way and so many regular people who have made just epic decisions about which way they’re gonna go and what they’re gonna give.’’

The larger question, for the show’s star Diego Luna, is how much the audience can balance what it thinks it knows about Cassian Andor against a show that is going to constantly place him in high-stakes jeopardy.

‘‘I’m going to challenge everything you think about Cassian,’’ Luna says. ‘‘Everything that made sense when you were watching [Rogue One] is now going to be challenged.

‘‘I do have that in mind. I know where it ends, and I can be very creative about how to get there. It triggers a different part of your creativity, when you start backwards. As an audience, not as an actor, there’s nothing I like the most than going to see big shows about historical moments where I get to see what’s in between what I know.

‘‘To me, it celebrates, in a way, and it challenges audiences in a very special way. It’s like you know this is possible. You know someone is capable of this. Well, I’m going to tell you something, you don’t know about what triggered that and, to me, that is when storytelling becomes fascinating.’’

–

Andor is now streaming on Disney+.