Lucasfilm
The “Star Wars” fandom is one often at war with itself these days – different factions who have various opinions about everything, especially anything made in the Disney era.
Tony Gilroy’s “Andor” series is one of the few things that seemed to unite a few of them, scoring a lot of love and acclaim not just from fanboys but those not heavily into “Star Wars”.
Following Kathleen Kennedy’s recent retirement as the head of Lucasfilm, The Wrap ran an analysis piece in which an unnamed source indicated that newly installed CCO Dave Filoni disliked “Andor”. Filoni himself has been more involved with “The Mandalorian” and “Ahsoka” shows.
A Lucasfilm spokesperson quickly denied the claim as inaccurate, but now Gilroy himself has commented on the chatter during a THR interview, saying while he’s had minimal interaction with Filoni over the years, there’s been no hostility or competition between the projects:
“No. We’ve only met a couple of times, and we’ve only had a half-dozen conversations over the last ten years. Seriously. I saw Jon Favreau at a scoring session once. We’ve always gotten along with those guys, and we’ve never had anything but high praise for everything that they’ve done. We only have our show because of them, and we’ve always said that was true. There’s no Andor without The Mandalorian. It would not exist. So it has never been anything but cordial and pleasant, ever, ever, ever, ever. I don’t know anything that you don’t know. I really don’t.”
He was also asked about how prescient the series has proven to be in the wake of current U.S. politics, but Gilroy downplayed that saying they were just following history:
“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. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism.”
As for the future, he says he’s not sure if we’ll ever see something like Andor again that’s “made live, not by AI”. He adds: “Will someone ever spend that kind of money to make something live again [on streaming]? I don’t know if that will ever happen again, but what a great thing it is to be able to have done it.”
“Andor” is now available in full on the Disney+ service.