Andor star Diego Luna says the key to keeping the Star Wars series grounded is making sure that every question has an answer.
Andor star Diego Luna has revealed the key to keeping the Star Wars series grounded: making sure every question has an answer.
During an interview with Collider, Luna explained that the Andor team’s goal was to make viewers “forget that we’re in a galaxy far, far away.” According to Luna, making sure there was an answer to every potential question was instrumental in this, as it allowed the cast and crew to convey certain things without explicitly spelling them out for the audience. “There’s a lot we don’t tell you here, but we need you to feel it,” he said.
“We all needed to know the story behind,” Luna continued. “This is something we spend a lot of time doing. Having so many conversations before getting on set, asking all the questions that you had to ask because [in] the moment on set, you had to know what you’re doing there, why you’re there, why you’re wearing this, what is the purpose of a room like this?”
In other words, Andor is a show that makes it a point not to lean on the suspension of disbelief typically associated with the sci-fi genre. “Sometimes there’s a feeling when you’re doing science fiction that you can get away with things, you know?” Luna said. “That, who cares? The character happens to be here. In this process, that wasn’t the case. In this process, if you didn’t have an answer, you were not doing your job. And that applied [to] everyone on set. Not just the actors.”
Luna also visited sets before filming, so as to create a sense of familiarity with them that would come across on-camera. “I wanted to understand everything, and I would ask the questions,” the actor said. “I would have these sessions with Luke [Hull], our production designer, on set to be introduced to my house or, you know where he sleeps? […] There’s a shelf where I bring the Starpath Unit out of, and we came up with the idea of hitting it twice and then the thing opens by itself. That’s not written, you know?”
He continued, “You arrive with a production designer, you go, ‘What’s a cool way to open it in a way no one else would know?’ ‘It’s possible.’ ‘Ah, let’s do it this way,’ and we came up with that little thing. And it’s something very specific and thin, [but] it’s a layer that’s there of authenticity. It would have been very simple to arrive and open the shelf, bring the thing out, but no. We came up with a little trick Cassian knows and does, that way you understand things are safe if they’re in there.”
Andor Is a Mature Take on the Star Wars Galaxy
Andor stars Luna as Cassian Andor, a character Star Wars fans were first introduced to in the 2016 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The Disney+ series shows how Cassian came to be involved with the Rebel Alliance. Its first season — taking place five years before the events of Rogue One — premiered this past September, running for a total of 12 episodes through November. Production is currently underway on Andor‘s 12-episode second season, which will cover the four years between Season 1 and Rogue One, bringing the series to a close.
Andor Season 1 is currently streaming on Disney+.
Source: Collider