Tony Gilroy’s slow, adult, deeply unsentimental two-season prequel to Rogue One. Diego Luna plays a thief on the road to becoming a rebel. Widely called the best Star Wars production ever made.
| Diego Luna | Cassian Andor |
| Stellan Skarsgård | Luthen Rael |
| Genevieve O’Reilly | Mon Mothma |
| Adria Arjona | Bix Caleen |
| Denise Gough | Dedra Meero |
| Andy Serkis | Kino Loy (S1) |
| Ben Mendelsohn | Director Krennic |
| Forest Whitaker | Saw Gerrera |
Andor is the prequel to Rogue One, but really it’s a series about how an empire breaks people and how a rebellion knits itself together from the breakage. It opens with Cassian Andor as a thief on a peripheral planet. It ends, twelve episodes into season two, on the eve of the events of Rogue One. The space between is filled with prison breaks, intelligence-service tradecraft, terrorism, surveillance, and one of the great speeches in modern television.
Tony Gilroy is the writer of the Bourne films. He is not a Star Wars fan and is not interested in Star Wars iconography. He is interested in totalitarianism, in resistance, in the mechanics of how ordinary people get drafted into political violence. Andor is a Star Wars show that doesn’t mention Jedi for hours at a time. The series treats the original films as a working political backdrop rather than a fan-service mood board.
The most-quoted speech in the series is delivered by Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen Rael in the second-to-last episode of season one. It is a monologue about what kinds of compromise are necessary to fight fascism, written and performed without flinching. Network and streaming TV produced very little in 2022 that was as morally exact.
The final season, broken into four three-episode arcs covering one year of in-fiction time each. The result feels less like a season of television than four short films stitched together. Won 5 Emmys at the 77th Primetime Emmys including Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. There will be no season 3; Gilroy ends the show on the morning Cassian boards the ship for Rogue One.
Watch this one anyway. The franchise is essentially incidental to the story; Andor would work as an original political thriller without any prior knowledge of the universe.
The best Star Wars ever made for the screen, and one of the best political dramas of the decade. Don’t let the franchise discourage you.