‘Andor’ star says ‘Rogue One’ pioneered breaking the ‘Star Wars’ mold

We’ve only got one more episode to go before Andor marches back into Tony Gilroy‘s writers room for season two, but we could all safely say for a while now that it’s been a triumphant success for this absolute maverick of a Star Wars story. Andor is precisely what happens when you give every facet of storytelling for the screen the proper room to breathe, and the show has taken that opportunity and continues to run full tilt with it.

Indeed, a character-driven political thriller isn’t the usual baseline for a Star Wars story, but then again, Andor isn’t your usual Star Wars story. In fact, it seems all too happy about snapping the sci-fi franchise’s mold over its knee.

But according to Diego Luna, who portrays the eponymous thief-turned-revolutionary Cassian Andor in the show, we have Rogue One to thank for walking so that Andor could sprint, as he revealed in an interview with The Playlist.

During the interview, Luna pointed out how Rogue One, which Andor serves as a prequel to, deviated from the franchise in many ways, not only through being a standalone story in the midst of countless sagas, but through introducing a much darker tone as well The violence and grey morality of Rogue One was an easy standout at the time of its release.

I think we can blame Rogue One for this. Rogue One was meant to be different. It was the first stand-alone Star Wars story; they found many ways to say this is supposed to be different. The first big difference is it had a beginning and an end; that was it… You meet a character and then goodbye. And Rogue One had an opportunity to be different, to have a different tone, it was more violent, darker and we got away with that. Audiences liked it, they liked it a lot.

He would go on to credit Andor‘s mutation of this broken mold to series creator Tony Gilroy, whose storytelling ability was one that Luna was all too happy to sing praise for.

Tony Gilroy is such a different writer; I can tell you I have never felt that energy with anyone else. The way he makes every line, every step, every character meaningful, there’s a reason for everything. If you sit down in front of him, there’s no answer he cannot give. He’s thought of everything before sharing it. It’s quite impressive to see how control he is of this story.

The first season of Andor is currently available to stream on Disney Plus, with new episodes releasing every Wednesday until the season’s conclusion on Nov. 23. A second season, which will also be the last, is currently in development.