Television

Tony Gilroy on Andor, the Force, and Authoritarianism

"The concept of the show was to talk about what happens when authoritarianism and fascism comes kicking down your door," the creator of the Disney series tells Reason.

Eric Boehm | From the April 2026 issue

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(Photo: Tony Gilroy; Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times via Contour RA by Getty)

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Andor Creator Tony Gilroy on Bureaucracy and the Surveillance State

The fictional Star Wars universe is full of terrifying and powerful villains, from planet-destroying superweapons to black-cloaked space wizards wielding magic swords. In Andor, that well-trod story of the evil Galactic Empire becomes something even more unsettling: a portrait of how authoritarian systems consolidate power and crush dissent.

Over its two-season run, the critically acclaimed Disney series explored the formation of the Rebel Alliance that would eventually confront and defeat the Empire, as first seen in the original 1977 Star Wars film and its sequels. Andor offers a gritty view of what it takes to organize a mass uprising against a tyrannical government. Luke Skywalker might be the hero of the Star Wars story, but Andor suggests he'd never have had the opportunity to destroy the Death Star without the subterfuge, spycraft, and sacrifice that mold the rebellion.

Tony Gilroy, the veteran screenwriter who largely wrote and directed Andor, reimagined the Empire as a bureaucratic machine set on centralizing control and normalizing surveillance. What results is an all-too-familiar story of a powerful government shattering cultures, seizing private corporations, and pursuing anyone seen as a threat to its authority. In Gilroy's telling, fascism does not arrive with a single dramatic rupture, but with a slow tightening of executive powers and a willing staff of employees hoping to advance their careers.

That realism, drawn not just from current events but from the long and ugly history of authoritarian regimes, may explain why the series resonated so strongly with audiences across ideological lines.

In a December 2025 conversation with Reason, Gilroy reflected on the decision to set aside the lightsabers and lore to tell a story about moral and political dilemmas. Gilroy also spoke about his resistance to reading Andor through a simple left-right political lens, his belief that the destruction of communities is essential to autocratic rule, and why depicting power as banal and procedural can be more frightening than any planet-destroying weapon.

Reason: For anyone who isn't familiar, catch us up briefly on where this is in the Star Wars timeline and how this show fits into the broader story.

Gilroy: Rogue One is the discovery of the plans to the Death Star that will lead to what people traditionally know as the beginning of Star Wars. [Andor] is the five years gathered around one of the main characters of Rogue One, Cassian Andor.

Our last scene in Andor is him walking into what would be the first scene of Rogue One. It's a five-year tranche of history right before the destruction of the Death Star, and it is a five-year period where the Empire is really tightening its grip around the throat of the galaxy in the most extreme way.

One of the interesting things about Andor is that it sort of leaves aside—maybe not entirely, but largely—the mystical side of Star Wars. Was that something you decided to do deliberately?

Our attitude was: We're going to take the Latin Mass out of the church. We're going to do it a different way. That was the mandate.

One of my original questions to the experts was, "In this huge galaxy, how many people would have ever encountered a Jedi? How many people would ever know about the Force? How many people know about this family you keep rotating these movies on?"

And the answer is: almost nobody. If you're a being in the galaxy, you've probably never had any encounter with Jedi or the Force. In the beginning, I was never, ever, ever going to touch on the Force. We're certainly going to do a show without lightsabers. And we'll certainly do a show that doesn't have anything to do with the same people that you've been dealing with all this time.

Coming into the second season, there was a really cool way to touch [the Force] and have it enhance our story. So we touched on it. I liked the way we ended up doing it.

The concept of the show was to talk about what happens when authoritarianism and fascism comes kicking down your door—ordinary people—and you're forced to make a choice. A lot of people in the show are forced to make choices because of events. And that doesn't really involve........

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