John Gilroy: Season 1 gave us a lot of confidence. We felt like we were doing something right. The way we did it with both seasons is, I usually take the front and it’s really about setting the tone, the vibe and getting off the dock the right way. And so, I give those episodes to myself. I’m a little jealous later on because, as the story gets on, it gets sexier and sexier. But I’m needed at the front so I do the front episodes, and I’m all over the rest of the show too, later on.
Paste: As a storyteller in the chain, did you spend any time with Tony and Dan in the writers’ room for Season 2 to understand their intentions when you started getting footage?
Gilroy: It’s a process that we have. It starts with the writers’ room for the writers all huddled together for a couple weeks who really do a wonderful map of what’s going to happen. Everybody goes off and writes, and then Tony will put his fingerprints on everybody’s script eventually. We do something sort of akin. We have wonderful editors, Yan Miles and Matt Cannings and Morten Højbjerg and Craig Ferreira, who was a first [assistant editor] last year, and he did a great job. You hire the right people, and they’re all great editors. I do my shows. They do their shows, and then I come in as a producer along with Tony and Sanne Wohlenberg, and we give our notes and fix things. The weird thing for me as an executive producer and also an editor, instead of describing something that might be good, I can just make it. I can edit it out and go, “See, something like this?” I do that occasionally, if I need to. It’s a wonderful, speedy tool.
Paste: Was there a specific episode or scene where you helped them shape a scene like that?
Gilroy: The scripts have to be great, and they are, but you get into things. Editing is all problem solving. There’s not that many problems to solve when you have a great script, but there’s certainly little things you have to do. In a show like episode three, there’s a lot of different emotions. It’s going from one emotion to another, and covering a lot of ground and that’s tricky to find. You don’t want to jar people, but you want to be able to navigate them from one emotion to another and that was fun to do.
Paste: At the start of “One Year Later,” Cassian is reintroduced during a quiet moment with a new Rebellion spy embedded in the Empire and then a crazy, terrible piloting moment for Cass in the TIE Avenger. What did you enjoy most about cutting that sequence?
Gilroy: There’s like three little moments in there where it’s sort of like comedy through frustration because it’s not working out. The idea of the whole thing is to give the audience a good Star Wars action punch. We do have a really beautiful scene between Cassian and Naya in the lead up. In that scene, you see how seasoned he’s become. Maybe he was the student in the first season, but he’s the teacher in the second season. That sequence was fairly easy to do for me, because it was all very much conceived by [director] Ari and Mohen Leo and TJ Falls, our VFX guys. Something that complicated, we will pre-vis to see what that will look like and I have to say, it’s probably very close to what was conceived originally. It really made my life easy. I like that.
Paste: There’s an amazing oner that follows Mon Mothma as she welcomes wedding guests to their Chandrila residence, where she’s also doing her downlow Rebellion work with Tay Kolma (Ben Miles), Luthen and her cousin Vel (Faye Marsay). That’s an important sequence juggling a lot, so where do oners land for you as an editor?
Gilroy: If Ari was on this call, he’d be laughing right now that you say that. As an editor, oners make me really nervous. That was one of our biggest ones, and it was beautifully done. Ari’s really good and he’s really just a skilled director. Whenever I see a oner, I kind of break out into a cold sweat. But you know what? Something like that in the middle of the show is really good filmmaking. You just have to pick your moments. I don’t know what they did, like 14 takes, but we picked the right one. It was really good. No editor likes it. But if it works, it works. It’s a score for the team.
Paste: Elsewhere, you get to edit the reintroduction of Rogue One’s Krennic and the Ferrix refugee clan. What stood out for you there?
Gilroy: The Krennic scene has two things. Just seeing Krennic again in that castle in the sky in the top secret meeting, that just made everybody happy because we love to see him. And I got involved with the making of that [Ghorman twill] industrial [film] and we had a lot of fun with that. I just love seeing that goofy, innocent, industrial in this viper pit of carnage. It’s just such a weird juxtaposition. Then, I love the whole Mina-Rau planet. It’s really good to see people that we know were in distress in the last season, and we see them now having maybe five minutes of quiet fun. They’re enjoying themselves with good, hard working people that you know. It’s nice to see Adria [Bix] and our gang there.
Paste: “Harvest” stands out because a lot of character stories are happening at the same time.
Gilroy: It was a complicated script, and it’s definitely what Tony and I sometimes call “advanced filmmaking,” but it was a good battle plan. I just love that episode because it changes the channel. You go from this ancient wedding to like this mid-century modern dinner party. You don’t see the next move coming.
Paste: Speaking of the Syril/Meero dinner with Eedy, it’s like the most passive-aggressive comedy of manners in Star Wars history?
Gilroy: You have three tremendous actors working together. All three of them are just such heavyweights. Your eye goes to Eedy, she’s such a piece of work. She just played it wonderfully. We don’t have a lot of laughs in our show but there’s some moments in there that you just can’t help but laugh. She’s so passive aggressive and walks in there and has them both, especially Dedra who’s got her shit together all the time. They look at each other, and she’s like, “Oh my God. This is who raised you?”
Paste: I think it’s the only time we ever see Meero even try to smile?
Gilroy: Ariel directed most of the episodes, the first six. He came up with that wonderful little montage of them getting ready for the dinner and the clothes. Some people might have an inkling of who’s coming to dinner, but you might not. We never tell you, you just know it’s going to be important. Who knows, Major Partagaz might be walking in the door.
Paste: By the end, you’re cross-cutting amongst Bix fighting back against the Imperial auditor’s assault, Cassian’s arrival in the TIE Avenger, and Luthen delivering Tay’s death sentence to Mon and her dance of abandon; a lot to balance?
Gilroy: The dance music going over, sometimes, really emotional things and juxtaposing this happy crowd with Mon and her internal horror, and what Bix is going through with the assault, there were some tricky things in there.
Paste: Did you always use that electro song played at the wedding?
Gilroy: That was a song that was a callback from season one called “Niamos!”. The conceit was that it was an intergalactic hit like “Macarena” or whatever. We used it as the dance number and going into it, you’re hoping that that one song can carry. The whole last arc is probably 15 or 20 minutes, so you’re hoping that will actually be able to drive you through the whole thing. We had to field test that. But once we put it up, we were like, “Yeah, this works.” We didn’t have to change songs, and the song gets crazier and crazier as the dancing continues.
Paste: You have to close on the terrible loss of Brasso as Cassian arrives. Is there a best way to frame a death so that you know you’re getting the very most from an audience emotionally?
Gilroy: I think the best way to do something like that is to be the most honest, to not try to milk it too much. There’s an honesty to our show so there’d be honesty to the death scenes. There’s an honesty to our action sequences, so we don’t double cut explosions. Tony and I have both felt like this for years, in that the more realistic something is, the more you feel like a fly on the wall. Or, the more you’re enveloped in it, you can identify with it. If we’re honest, we have a greater chance of making you cry, which is good.
Paste: And then you close on Diego’s stricken face.
Gilroy: Yeah, he’ll show his emotions.
Andor Season 2 releases three new episodes every Tuesday on Disney+ through May 13.
Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, IGN and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios, Avatar: The Way of Water and the latest, The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett, Bluesky @tarabennett.bsky.social, or Instagram @TaraDBen,
