It’s not the best time to be a Star Wars fan. While there’s more content than ever being released, the quality has varied wildly. The sequel trilogy split fans right down the middle, and shows that seemed destined to win them back, like The Mandalorian, dipped in quality in its latest season. The one Star Wars release that everyone seems to agree on, though, is Andor.
Andor is excellent. By stripping away the Skywalker connection, and bypassing fan service moments, the show was able to hunker down and focus on quality storytelling. It paid off. Andor received some of the best reviews of any Star Wars release since the franchise was acquired by Disney, and much of the show’s success has to do with Diego Luna’s leading performance.
Luna, an actor with decades of impressive work to his name, had the benefit of knowing how Cassian Andor ended up. Andor died in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), after retrieving information that would help to blow up the Death Star and eventually defeat the Empire. Luna discussed Andor during a recent interview with IndieWire, and he cited the ability to build backwards as part of what drew him to the show.
“How f***ed up can we find this character and how difficult can we make the journey for him?” Luna posited. “It’s important that we start in a place where you can’t believe that that captain is going to come out of this man we find in Ferrix, just trying to survive in a very cynical way in a very dark time in his life.”
The actor worked closely with Andor creator Tony Gilroy to shape a character that was tethered to the world of Star Wars, without succumbing to any of its limitations. Andor is one of the most morally complex people in the entire saga, and leaning into that, rather than downplaying it, is what made the first season of the show so compelling.
All actors are required to build from scratch. Luna has played every kind of character there is, from a sex-crazed teen in Y Tu Mama Tambien and a hopeless romantic in The Terminal, to a ruthless kingpin Narcos: Mexico. What makes the character of Andor so intriguing is that he has the same “from scratch” approach to life.
He’s gone undercover so many times, and moved around so often, that performance is part of his reality. Luna delighted in playing up these meta-qualities. “He is someone who has been forced to migrate, who’s a refugee,” he added. “He’s had to start his life from scratch, and probably not just once. And now with Andor, Tony took that to the next level.”
The decision to take things to the “next level” proved a smart one. Luna received universal praise from critics and fans, and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Television Series Drama in 2022. Andor has been renewed for a second season on Disney Plus, but production is currently halted due to the writer’s strike.