“Andor” is putting the war in “Star Wars.”
The upcoming Disney+ series, originally slated for an August 31 release, confirmed a delayed premiere date to September 21. Diego Luna, as the titular Cassian Andor, dares to steal from the Empire in a tense new trailer with Stellan Skarsgård leading the charge against the regime. Forest Whitaker, Adria Arjona, Genevieve O’Reilly, and Fiona Shaw also star. Emmy-winning “Succession” composer Nicholas Britell is handling the score.
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Andor famously served as a Rebel spy and helped deliver Death Star received by Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) in “A New Hope.”
Set five years before “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” the series is billed by showrunner Tony Gilroy as a spy thriller that will subvert “Star Wars” fans expectations through “sideways” storytelling and will also reframe the 2016 trilogy. “It’s about him being really revolution-averse, and cynical, and lost, and kind of a mess,” Gilroy said, with the story following Andor into adulthood after the destruction of his world.
“His adopted home will become the base of our whole first season, and we watch that place become radicalized,” Gilroy continued. “Then we see another planet that’s completely taken apart in a colonial kind of way. The Empire is expanding rapidly. They’re wiping out anybody who’s in their way.”
“Andor” was in development since 2018, with Luna telling The Hollywood Reporter in 2020 that the series was filmed like “a very long movie.”
The 12-episode first season will cover one year of Andor’s life, while the second season (filming this fall) will stretch across four diegetic years total onscreen, jumping one year ahead every three episodes.
“The scale of the show is so huge,” Gilroy previously explained. “Directors work in blocks of three episodes, so we did four blocks [in Season 1] of three episodes each. [For Season 2] we looked and said, ‘Wow, it’d be really interesting if we come back, and we use each block to represent a year. We’ll move a year closer with each block…’ from a narrative point of view, it’s really exciting to be able to work on something where you do a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and then jump a year.”
“Andor” now premieres September 21 on Disney+ with the first three episodes dropping that day.
Check out the latest trailer below.
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