Andor’s Writer Reveals Which Star Wars Easter Eggs We Missed

This story first appeared in Trying!, a thoughtful, funny, sprawling daily newsletter featuring essays from the mind of Matt Gross. You can sign up for them here.

If you haven’t been watching Andor, you’ve been missing out. Yes, it’s a Star Wars show, streaming on Disney+, but it’s unlike any other series or movie set in that galaxy far, far away. In Andor, there is no magical Force, no nerd lore of Jedis and Sith and padawans, no heroic bloodlines and familial dramas determining the course of history. Instead, Andor is about life under the fascist Empire, about how the authoritarian regime breeds rebellion, and about the cost of the struggle, to everyone on every side. Yes, there are some non-human aliens, cool starships flying through hyperspace, the occasional pew pew blaster battle, but Andor focuses on the regular folks caught up in the fight: farmers and smugglers, antiques dealers and politicians, intel officials and mid-level bureaucrats, criminals and idealists, textile magnates and overbearing mothers.

In its two-season, 24-episode run, which came to an end on May 13, Andor — named for its protagonist, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) — sketched out a dark, often despairing, yet ultimately hopeful tale of intertwining fates, although perhaps “fate” is too portentous a word in a narrative universe where death visits frequently and capriciously. There are no Skywalker-esque heroes in Andor — just a legion of unknowns whose actions ultimately, collectively bring down the regime, though many (most?) do not live to see that moment.

As it happens, the final three episodes — in which an inside tip about the Death Star sets in motion the events that will lead, via the movie Rogue One, to R2D2 and C-3PO landing on Tatooine and meeting Luke Skywalker — were written by my old friend Tom Bissell. So I called him up to find out how the show came together.

This interview has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. It probably contains spoilers, so you should probably go and watch the whole series first, just to be safe.

I want to start at the very, very, very end of the whole thing with what I’ve been thinking of as “the montage of inscrutable faces”: Kleya, Bix, and Mon Mothma’s husband, who I always think of as Monsieur Mothma—

Tom Bissell: Perrin is his name, Perrin.

Okay, Perrin. All of these people from various parts of the show just silently going on with their lives in their own little corners of the galaxy. How do you write that ending? What does that look like on paper?

We called it the Wheel of Fate. The way it’s set up on the page is that, you know, Cassian is walking across the tarmac toward his ship. And then you do a cut to and then you do a scene header, and then just very quickly and evocatively as possible, you describe what that person is doing. So it’s pretty simple. And then you just count on when they’re shooting it, they’re going to change a lot, obviously. Here’s what I’ll say: Very few of those spoke wheels in the Wheel of Fate turned out exactly how I imagined they were going to. And all of them were better than what I was imagining.

How aware are you of the multiple audiences that you are writing for when you’re writing scripts like this? There’s your showrunner, the director, the actors who are all separate audiences who are then going to create something out of that for the final audience. Are you writing some bits of the lines for them and not for us?

A lot of people when they’re writing screenplays forget that a screenplay is a blueprint for something else. I know a lot of screenwriters sometimes when they’re starting out, they write stuff and they keep things very ambiguous ’cause they don’t want to spoon-feed the audience. And I often have to remind young screenwriters the script is never going to be ingested by a reading audience. The script is going to be ingested by your fellow collaborators, and they have to know what your intent is, right? So some screenwriters go further than this than others. Some try to provide a lot of detail. Some provide very skeletal detail.

Tony [Gilroy, the series creator] was very adamant that he wanted all of us — me, Beau [Willimon], and Dan [Gilroy] and himself — to be what he calls directing on the page. Not down to using lens types and “medium close-up” and stuff like that. But just trying to create a sense of movement and a sense of detail on the page, just enough, just the right amount of detail to inspire other departments to start putting their thinking hats on, their storyteller hats on.

So it’s a real artful balance of the right amount of detail to spur other people’s imaginations. Not so little that other departments are just left like, “Well, what the hell do we do with this?” And not so much that everyone feels boxed in or over-directed by the screenwriter, because most of what you put on there they’re not going to do. And that’s fine. Tony’s goal is always to get the script so bulletproof that everyone knows what they’re doing, everyone knows what they need to get.

I’ve heard a lot of other TV writers talk about the back and forth that evolves between the actors and the writer in terms of the writer writing for how they know the actors are going to be performing the lines and the actors changing things so that the writer, you know, comes back with stuff that fits them better. Does that mean that there was less of that because you were creating these bulletproof scripts? Or did the bulletproofing emerge from that back and forth?

I was never on set for Andor, so I can’t speak to that. Generally speaking, my other screen projects I’ve done, my view is, you know, 95% of the time I’m totally willing to listen to an actor who has ideas. And my thing I always say is play with it, just don’t make it worse. You know? And I’m frequently delighted and surprised that actors are able to improve on what’s there because they’re the ones that have to make it real, right? And if they’re not hearing the music and if they’re struggling with it, that should tell you, the screenwriter, something. And it’s often just a very simple little fix or a little twist here or there. But I will say, on Andor, having been pretty familiar with the scripts, it’s usually very close to what is on the page, usually. Usually very close!

“I remember just worrying, ‘Is this going to be just a huge energy drop?’ Is this going to be like a talky, jargon-laden scene that has no impact?”

That’s got to be gratifying.

Oh my God, when you have performers like the ones you have in this show, the music they are able to put on your scripts is genuinely astounding.

Is there a particular line reading that sticks out to you? Something that you wrote and that one of the actors came back with an interpretation of it that you hadn’t anticipated?

The Dedra-Krennic confrontation scene [in season 2, episode 11], to me, stands out as a scene that I was worried about. It was long, it was shaggy, it was filled with tons of technical detail and disclosures about stuff that had happened off-screen that is really important. And Tony and I worked, you know — I took a bunch of cracks at that scene, and then Tony finished it, and he did, like, incredible work to finish it. And I remember just worrying, “Is this going to be just a huge energy drop?” Is this going to be like a talky, jargon-laden scene that has no impact? And seeing the way people have responded to that scene has been one of the most gratifying things I’ve experienced. It is a riveting scene. And that all comes down to the performances and the way Alonso Ruizpalacios blocked it.

When he puts his finger on her head, that was not in the script. And when you have a long scene like that, it is paramount that you find the power exchanges and the turns, because they’re not necessarily there on the page. And the way that they made that conversation feel so alive, and such a power struggle, that’s just people reading what’s on the page and making very smart choices about how to put it on its feet and, as Tony always says, “make it real.” And so, I had lots of concerns about that scene and holy cow, were they annulled the first time I saw it.

I’m glad you brought up that scene because one of the arcs that I found most fascinating here was Dedra Meero’s [Denise Gough]. There’s no blow-up. There’s no drama. She’s hustled off-screen into a cell, and then into another cell, and then into another cell. She doesn’t get shot in the head. Was it a decision early on to treat big moments quietly?

That is a very powerful thing I picked up from season one, and I talked to Tony about it at one point, about how quickly major characters die. And how, without fanfare, they die. Very rarely does anyone get a moving last speech. Very rarely does someone hold in their arms an expiring person and they tell them the important … Like, that almost never happens in this show. And I talked to Tony about that and he was very matter of fact about it. He was like, “You know, when you want it to feel real, this is how, in conflict, this is how people go. They go fast.”

I took a real cue from that because so often in movies and in TV shows, the heroic death is something that is played up, and I really admire this show’s refusal to do that. Death is sudden, dirty, quick, unglamorous, and the characters just have to move on. And in a weird way, the quickness and the suddenness and the unceremonialness of it actually somehow makes the deaths hit harder. You’d think it’d be the opposite, but it’s not. And I think that’s just Tony making very smart decisions through years of experience about how to handle this stuff, that, that the thing that hits the hardest is the thing you didn’t see coming. And then when it happens, you’re in shock, the characters are in shock, and so there’s a nice emotional parity between the audience and the characters around that person that just got, you know, shot through with a blaster.

You once told me that TV writing is all about structure — that if you can do structure, you can write for TV. And I’m curious to hear how you imagine the structure of the three episodes that you wrote as a whole, and of each one individually. How do we process that? Do you have a visual imagination of the structure?

It’s really just trial and error. I’m less structure-minded than a lot of writers. I’m pretty intuitive and I feel my way in, and I rearrange stuff until it feels good. But, you know, you have 45 to 58 pages to tell the story. And TV shows that don’t have commercials don’t break into handy five acts the way, like, a network show would.

And they’re not movies, so three-act structure doesn’t quite fit into 45 to 55 minutes quite as neatly as it does into a two-hour movie. So TV is kind of its own weird beast. All the things in my episodes that were hard were figuring out how information was gonna travel from one person to the next, and then how that would reverberate. [Episode] 10 was an interesting one ’cause that was structured about a woman trying to get into a hospital to kill her father figure with these staggered flashbacks in between. So, that was just a matter of allotting time to the opening, the confrontation between Dedra and Luthen, Dedra’s arrest, and then it’s all Kleya, and it’s all a dance between the flashback and the forward-progressing motion. So, the structure for that one was just getting the balance right of flashback to incursion. There was so many more pieces to her incursion at one point, and there were several more flashbacks that didn’t wind up getting in.

The second and third episodes, Tony is really to credit for the structure in those. In my original Episode 11, that episode ended with them getting off Coruscant with Kleya. You know, it was literally them hitting hyperspace, going to Yavin. And then my own draft of Episode 12 opened with them arriving on Yavin. So the brilliant thing Tony did is he broke the ending confrontation between the SWAT trooper guys coming to get Melshi and Cassian and Kleya. He just broke that sequence in half and he put the front top half of it in Episode 12. And thank God he did because I was really sweating in 12. It was a very chatty episode, and it was a very talky episode. And the magic of putting that battle sequence at the top of it? Oh my God, it took so much pressure off.

I knew the Wheel of Fate was gonna be great, but everything getting up to that, I was really sweating, and Tony made some just baller changes that pulled my bacon out of that particular fire, I would say.

That to me feels again like one of those big moments versus small moments, right? You get your big fight, your satisfying action at the beginning, but then everything else that happens after that is, in terms of consequence, enormous, but in terms of how it plays out, is quiet.

The first thing you do is like, “Okay, what happens?” The first couple passes we took at, with Beau at the whiteboard writing down, there was not much on the board. We were staring at it at one point, and I said, “Is this gonna be a 15-minute episode?”

And the breakthrough for the episode was Beau just throwing out pretty casually, “What if Bail [Organa, Princess Leia’s adoptive father] is the bad guy?” Like, “What if Bail and Cassian don’t get along?” So we knew Luthen and Bail Organa probably didn’t like each other, but the more we started digging into it, we just created this whole backstory of maybe they never met. And maybe Bail’s held all this, like, animosity toward Luthen for big-footing him with the Mon Mothma escape and his compromised rescue team. The more we started talking about that, suddenly Bail Organa, who’s been portrayed in a very consistent way as this very good, kind man — and he is — but putting Bail in this suddenly new, emotionally distinct situation where he’s going up against our hero, and very clearly opposed to the methodology of Luthen, who’s another one of the heroes or anti-heroes of the whole show. Suddenly you’re gonna have a beloved Star Wars character shown in just a really different light. I love the last conversation he and Cassian have. Tony added the bit about Cassian telling him, “You and Luthen would have gotten along much better than you think.”

You’re a Star Wars guy — as is, you know, just about everybody who’s our age. How much of that stuff comes from your own knowledge? Are you dropping Easter eggs in there?

Two Easter eggs that I suggested on the page got in. One was the name of the hospital that Kleya goes to, which is called Lina Soh. She was the Chancellor from the High Republic days. And I had no idea if it was gonna get in. I just stuck it into the script, and then someone went and named it that.

And the other was when Luthen shows Dedra the dagger. It’s a Nautolan bleeder, he calls it. Uh, that was a little treat for my kiddo who, whose favorite Star Wars character is Kit Fisto, who’s the Nautolan, the fish guy with the long tentacles. And so I can’t remember what Tony had it as, but I changed it to Nautolan. And then when he shows her the knife and it had the little Kit Fisto Nautolan guy’s head on it, I was like, “Oh my God, that one got in, too.” So those are the only two Easter eggs that I am aware that I consciously put into the scripts.

Most of them, as I understand, are added by production design. Tony has said there’s a mix of people who know a lot about Star Wars on the show and a mix of people who don’t.

I want to jump back to episode 10, in which Luthen Rael [Stellan Skarsgård], our undercover rebel mastermind, attempts suicide after being discovered—and then his adopted daughter, Kleya Marki [Elizabeth Dulau], has to kill him before he can recover and be tortured into revealing secrets. Is that the only episode in the whole show that doesn’t actually feature Andor?

Yeah.

“Tony Gilroy is the master of the heist.”

Was that your idea? Was that the plan from the start?

I don’t think the original plan was that was gonna be an Andor-less episode. But I think the more we talked about it, the more everyone but Luthen and Kleya just dropped out of it. That was a really fun episode to sketch. It’s a very simple episode: He’s in hospital, she has to go get him. So, I’m writing an incursion episode. I’m writing, like, basically a heist.

Tony Gilroy is the master of the heist. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the sequence in the first Bourne movie where Matt Damon has to get out of the embassy. I asked Tony for advice. He said, “Just watch the first Bourne movie.” That’s exactly what I did. ❝

With Star Wars, whenever people are looking at screens and getting information, everything’s in Aurebesh. And it’s very hard for the audience because 99% of the audience cannot read Aurebesh.

What’s the principle then? Is there, like, a guiding principle for writing a heist sequence?

They’re tricky. That’s why so many heists always show the crew talking about the pieces ahead of time and then cutting to them actually doing it, right? Because if it’s just words and you’re not doing cutaways, well, then it feels like the air is out of the tire. But then if you’re just showing them doing, but you, the viewer, don’t have any overarching sense of the greater plan, then it can feel confusing. You don’t understand exactly how clever the characters are being because you haven’t been cued to understand what the steps of the heist are.

This one’s a real tricky one, because Kleya is silent. And she has no one to talk to. So you have to be really smart about the cues. Like, the nurse’s outfit — well, that’s a gimme. She needs to sneak around. That’s it. Oh, I had her going to a panel and, like, clicking through floors and finding the one that was forbidden, and that’s how she knows that’s where Luthen is. Okay, well, then you watch the episode. They built this beautiful horseshoe-shaped set. And there’s just eyelines everywhere on that set. And when she’s walking down the hallway and she turns and she sees the elevator going up, up, up, and she sees two ISB guys in the elevator that stops at the 19th floor, that’s a visual cue. She’s like, “Aha, he’s there.” Now, that is not in the script. That is something they found on set, while blocking it. And my God, what a superior choice it was. Because you know, with Star Wars, whenever people are looking at screens and getting information, everything’s in Aurebesh, right? And so it’s very hard for the audience to know what the characters are looking at, because 99% of the audience cannot read Aurebesh.

I have one question that I was left with at the end of that episode. Granny Faiza, the elderly alien in a wheelchair — is she okay?

In my script, I had Kleya putting her in a closet and closing the door and walking away. So, I was even rougher on old Granny. But I think she’s okay. A fter the excitement of the assassination that went on on the floor above her, I think she was probably whisked out of there by her loving family. And she’s sipping tea and scatting away into the night.

Wheel of Fate cutting room floor!

Oh, God. She should have been in the Wheel of Fate. She absolutely should have been. Just still sitting there, kicking her legs.

One of the other things I liked about episode 10 is that Luthen’s suicide fails. He is ready for this moment. He has thought it through. He has planned everything out. And then he goes to kill himself, and he fails to kill himself.

It’s a weird choice. You’re right, it’s a strange choice, but it’s a wonderful choice.

And then it resonated with me, because there’s this line from Luthen, “We fight to win. That means we lose, and lose, and lose, and lose until we’re ready.” So, Trying! is very obsessed with this Sisyphean idea.

Nemik in season one, his manifesto ends with, “Try.”

So, is Andor a work of existentialism?

I don’t know the answer to that. I think it’s about sacrifice. It’s a character study of sacrifice. It’s about a show that begins with a guy who’s been traumatized, looking for meaning, looking for his sister, whom he never finds. But instead, what he does find is a community of people that he cares so much about, he’s willing to do anything to save them. And and by that, he may be leaving the entire galaxy. He comes to care for a group of people and a cause enough to commit the ultimate sacrifice. And everyone in this show, one way or another, sacrifices. I mean, Syril and Dedra, they sacrifice for the wrong things to get what they’re doing. Dedra sacrifices her humanity. Syril’s entire worldview is shattered, you know? And everyone gives up a lot, going after what they want in the show. And they’re all, like, T-boned by the imagined history of the Star Wars world. You know, as Tony often says, “These are characters who are trying to just live their lives, and then history comes knocking at their door. And then how do they deal with it?”

And that’s to me the trying for the show, is that it is a really very profound character study of people being pushed to the brink. Some people being pushed to the brink of evil, some people being pushed to the brink of good, and just seeing how everyone reacts.

How does sacrifice square with the other theme of Andor and of Star Wars in general—of hope? Hope seems to me to be presented as this sense of, “Here’s why we even go on.” And then the sacrifice is, “Well, I am gonna give it all for what? Someone else’s hope?” How do those work together?

People give it all. People give it all so the people they love have a better future. Luthen says it himself, “It’s a sunrise he’ll never see.” But what is Kleya, his surrogate daughter, what is the last thing you see her look at in this episode? The sun is coming up, and she sees this place that she has taught herself to hate and resent. And that little smile on her face as she realizes that she had a piece in building this. That there is hope. That maybe Luthen is gone, but she did something good here, and this is a good place and she’s gonna be happy here.

Cassian gives up everything. And in the last shot, it’s this child he didn’t know he had, the child that, with any luck, is going to grow up in a better place. Like, you’re a parent, I’m a parent. What wouldn’t you give up to know if your children could have a non-horrific time on this planet? And I think that’s worth giving up your life for. I would do it without hesitating.

I think the show takes a real hard look at what you need to do when you’re going up against authoritarian darkness. It’s not gonna be easy and not everyone’s gonna be around to enjoy the fruits of the struggle. A character like Saw Gerrera [Forest Whitaker] has accepted this about himself. I think he’s even almost joyful about it. You know, “We’ll all be dead by the time the Republic returns.”

My favorite moment in [the Wheel of Fate]: Cassian is a guy who’s been pushing away his destiny, doesn’t want to accept it, and when he turns and he sees the Force healer there and that little nod he has at her, that to me is him saying like, “You know, all that stuff you told me, the stuff I rejected, the stuff I, I didn’t believe, I believe it. I don’t wanna do it, but I’m doing it.” It’s a really powerful moment and every time I see that, every time I see that little head nod he gives her, I get a little emotional because I think it’s very subtle. It’s very subtle, but it’s genuinely beautiful.