“I’m trying to come up with a new word word for excited,” “Andor” creator Tony Gilroy said just a few hours after his show, set in the “Star Wars” universe, racked up 14 Emmy nominations. “I know that’s my job, but I’m having trouble coming up with something really, truly original to say.”
“Andor’s” second season, which takes place in the five years that lead up to 2016’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” which itself is set directly before the events of 1977’s “Star Wars,” had more nominations than Emmy powerhouses like “The Bear” (also part of the far-reaching Disney galactic republic). This is the final season of “Andor,” and it is very clearly going out on top.
Gilroy himself was nominated two times – for Outstanding Drama Series (as an executive producer of the series) and Original Music and Lyrics (as a songwriter), for “We are the Ghor (Planetary Anthem)” from the episode “Who Are You?” Now that’s range. “There’s been a lot of amusement on the on our texts today about that. But yes, it does please me greatly that I’m nominated as a songwriter. It’s very amazing and pleasing. I want to win now,” Gilroy said.
What was strange was how few acting nominations were among the 14. There were only two nominations, for Forest Whitaker (who plays Saw Gerrera, an uncompromising Rebel leader) and Alan Tudyk (for his performance capture work as K-2SO, a reprogrammed Imperial droid). The voters wholly ignored some of the very best performances, from this or any other year, including Diego Luna in the title role of Cassian Andor, who eventually leads the mission to retrieve the plans for the Death Star; Stellan Skarsgård as Luthen Rael, a Rebel agent; Adria Arjona as Bix Caleen, a mechanic who becomes radicalized alongside Cassian; Genevieve O’Reilly as Mon Mothma, a central figure in “Star Wars” lore who is given so much depth and personality here. And the list goes on and on and on.
“We worked as hard as we could work. We had a couple messages that we were really trying to sell for a couple months – one was that you don’t have to know anything about ‘Star Wars’ to watch the show. Yeah. Another one is, we have a dozen performances in our show that are not just dazzling moment-to-moment, but really have a substantial arc and foundation to them,” Gilroy said. “And they’re really something special.”
Gilroy said that he had a two-hour meeting about what the Emmys are, how the voters tend to lean, and how things were likely to shake out. “It’s a complicated process but I don’t understand it,” Gilroy said, even after all that explanation. Still, he’s heartened by the work that they produced. “I do think that there’s a bunch of performances in here that people are going to be talking about and discussing and thinking about for decades to come. I think that will be a victory,” Gilroy said.
The power of “Andor” too, spilled out into the real world, when during the #NoKingsDay protests, many participants came with “Andor”-related signs, quoting from the show and sporting the iconography of the Rebellion. “I wish people didn’t have to have those signs and I wish we didn’t have to go out and do all that. But it’s, I can’t lie and say that it doesn’t feel good when I see it,” Gilroy explained. “It’s really easy to feel disconnected right now. I have access to more connection, just on a daily basis, than a lot of people get in a month, and even I feel disconnected. And so to go out and see that and feel like you’re part of something, like you’re not losing your mind.”
Up next for Gilroy is a movie called “Behemoth!,” his first film as a writer/director since “The Bourne Legacy,” back in 2012. It stars Oscar Isaac as a cellist. (“There’s a lot of things on my desk that I’m supposed to be doing today,” Gilroy joked.) He’s deep in prep, which he said is “really great.” But he admitted that he is scared about returning to the director’s chair. “It’s good to be afraid. I am always afraid,” Gilroy said. “In the making of the things, if you’re not anxious along the way, you’re doing something wrong.”
A number of key team members from “Andor” are coming along with him to “Behemoth!,” among them producer John Gilroy, executive producer Sanne Wohlenberg and cinematographer Damián García. But more than that, he’s taking the system that they developed to make “Andor” and is looking to apply it to a feature. He describes it as “the workflow and how we how we don’t let anything fester for more than a moment, how we deal with everything as it comes in and how everybody knows everything.” It’s a “highly communicative, spiritual approach to making things” that he wants to bring along from “Andor” the most. He said that the model that they made on “Andor” will be used on “all projects going forward.” “How to make things with other people are lessons that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, no matter what I’m making,” Gilroy said.
Oh, and if there’s any country or planet out there that needs a national anthem, Gilroy is available. “Anybody who’s tired of their national anthem, I want to say that I’m available,” Gilroy joked.
