“Andor” season 2 will focus on Cassian’s life, Diego Luna says

• Andor’s second and final season would span four years across 12 episodes.
• Production would last into the second part of the 2020s.
•  Writer and director Tony Gilroy came up with the idea after initially thinking about doing a 5-season arc.

‘Andor‘, Tony Gilroy’s critically acclaimed television series, second and final season would span four years across 12 episodes in the run-up to the catastrophic events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

While Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) one year of existence was covered in Season 1, which won praise and honors throughout award season, Season 2’s accelerated manner is not just about raising tension and stakes; it’s also about being realistic about what they can do.

Rogue One will be approaching its 10-year anniversary in 2026 when Andor returns to Disney+ in what will most likely be 2024. Of course, Andor is a precursor to the movie, and despite the fact that ILM has access to cutting-edge technology, they haven’t actually figured out how to make characters age backward.

On a smaller scale, technology like the amazing de-aging that will be seen in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is achievable, but since production would probably last into the second part of the 2020s, it would be impossible to de-age Luna for four seasons.

The last four years of Cassian’s life could not be explored in the same way as Season 1 of the show, as Luna underlined in an interview with Perri Nemiroff to discuss his Critics Choice Award nomination for Best Actor in a Drama.

The performer said, “It’s not possible, but you know what? It’s not because of us. It’s because of Rogue One. I mean, I also have to look close enough to Rogue One. Can you imagine me in 10 years pretending to be the [character] I was 20 years ago? Just impossible. I mean, sadly there’s no machines or CGI that can do it.”

Luna previously elaborated on the amount of work that goes into producing a single season of a show like Andor and emphasized that with the first season, viewers watched about four years of Luna and Gilroy’s lives spread out over twelve episodes on television.

Although streaming may be making shows shorter, there is still a significant amount of human effort involved, which is sometimes ignored by audiences. Luna revealed:

“We didn’t want this to end up being an animated series. I am who I am, and Tony Gilroy has to be the writer of this. We cannot be doing this for 10 years. Basically, the first season took four years. The second will take a little less, but he has to write 12 episodes. Then we have to go [into] pre-production. That normally takes six to eight months to build these places and to start with the whole process of designing, casting. Then the execution is another seven [to] eight months, and then post-production starts. That’s not easy either. So it’s a long journey. Each season takes three [to] four years of my life and of Tony Gilroy’s life.”

In an earlier conversation with Collider, Gilroy revealed that when Season 2 premieres, the narrative would make its first time jump, jumping ahead a year after the season finale before delving into 1-year time periods of Cassian’s life, which will be spread across three episode blocks.

In her conversation with Nemiroff, Luna went into further detail on how Gilroy came up with this plot framework, revealing that at first, they had explored giving Andor a 5-season plotline before realising that it wasn’t actually possible.

“[O]bviously at the beginning we said like, “It’ll be great to do five seasons.” This was before COVID, long ago. But once we started, and we decided it was going to be this story this way, it was pretty clear that it would’ve been impossible to do five seasons of this. So Tony came with this amazing idea because we were already breaking it in blocks, in four blocks, four blocks of three episodes. That’s how we shoot. So each director gets three episodes and shoots that as a movie in a way. So Tony said like, “Well, if we’re missing four years, and we have four episodes, it could be perfect because it’s going to be like movies that would have a beginning and an end.” Each year will have a beginning and an end, and it would be a chapter of three episodes.”

Even while it’s terrible that we will eventually have to say goodbye to Cassian Andor once more, at least the character has given spectators another chance to interact with him and be motivated by the same rebellious spirit that drove his actions in Rogue One.

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