Star Wars Andor continued the franchise’s storytelling about political corruption and the fight from within to defeat an authoritarian power. This has been true since the first Star Wars movie, where Darth Vader and the Empire represented the corrupt government holding down everyone, and the rebellion was the people rising up against those in power. However, in today’s politically charged landscape, that makes something like this hard to talk about when discussing even a movie that relies on these storytelling tropes. According to the Star Wars: Andor creator, there were some rules about what he and his cast could talk about while promoting the Disney+ series.
Tony Gilroy spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about some things he was not allowed to talk about while promoting the Star Wars: Andor release. The entire series on Disney+ was about the fight against fascism, which was also what the original trilogy was about, with the Emperor as the authoritarian leader and Darth Vader as his weapon of mass destruction. However, Gilroy said he couldn’t talk about the series’ anti-fascist leanings, even though it was part of the story.
“You get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible,” Gilroy said. However, Girloy said that “fascism” was a word that Disney told him that he couldn’t use when promoting Star Wars: Andor to avoid generating political outrage. Disney felt the political talking points would drown out the show’s actual storylines.
“Diego [Luna] and I had some early, super long-lead press, and we tiptoed out,” Gilroy said. He said that the actors have a broad spectrum of political ideas, and he didn’t want anyone to “violate their conscience.” As a result, he said they came up with a line of explanation that tried to dance along the line without outright calling it fascism. “We studied history to make the show, and we based it on historical models,” Gilroy explained. “We don’t have a crystal ball. There’s comps for everything that we did all through history.”
James Gunn Faced Similar Problems With Superman
Image Courtesy of Lucasfilm
This was smart, even if it bothered Tony Gilroy at the time. Gilroy previously wrote the first three Bourne Identity films as well as the political movie Michael Clayton. He has never been afraid to show the political corruption in his movies and TV shows, and he didn’t hold back in Star Wars: Andor. Now that he no longer has to worry about sabotaging his show by pointing out its themes to people incapable of identifying them when watching, he doesn’t need to hold back.
James Gunn faced the same problems when he released Superman last year, and Gilroy even pointed that out in his interview. Superman is an alien from another planet who has called Earth his home and was raised on the planet. When Gunn referred to Superman as an immigrant, it was a completely accurate description of the character, but since the word is politically charged, it caused a lot of discourse slamming Gunn and the movie from people who couldn’t separate an alien immigrant to Earth from any other sort of immigrant. Disney knew that Star Wars: Andor would face the same arguments if Gilroy were honest about the anti-fascism themes, so he was censored to keep the political arguments from overshadowing the series.
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