How ‘Andor’ Built Backwards and Made ‘Star Wars’ Better
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Curated by the IndieWire Crafts team, Craft Considerations is a platform for filmmakers to talk about recent work we believe is worthy of awards consideration. In partnership with Disney, for this edition, we look at how costume design and acting reverse-engineered a thrillingly fresh story from what we already knew about “Andor.”
The most iconic shot of the original “Star Wars” is that of a young man gazing into the (binary) sunset, yearning for more out of life. But the galaxy is a big, big place. The first of the many things creator Tony Gilroy does to expand it with “Andor,” the prequel series for one of the core characters in “Rogue One,” was to turn his camera to a young man gazing into the fearful symmetry of the Empire, yearning for family, safety, and a home. Instead, he finds the Rebel Alliance.
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“From the beginning, there was something about the character that was very interesting for me to play, which is this idea of him coming from somewhere else,” actor Diego Luna, who plays the titular Cassian Andor, told IndieWire. “He is someone who has been forced to migrate, who’s a refugee. 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.”
In the videos below, Luna and costume designer Michael Wilkinson discuss how they utilized the tangible details of Gilroy’s vision for the Empire in order to trace Cassian’s transformation from a small-time smuggler into a nascent Rebel spy; and, through his story, tell a larger one of how oppression creates a flood of opposition that will, one day, drown out tyranny.
Finding Where Cassian Began
Luna, of course, had his own sense of who Cassian was and where he came from while filming “Rogue One.” It was impossible not to think about how and why a character who doesn’t sound or look like the other Nerf Herders in the Rebel Alliance is present. “Andor,” then, was not only a gift to flesh out Cassian’s backstory but the chance to create a level of detail that makes the whole Rebel Alliance more real, meaningful, and desperately, radically heroic.
Luna wanted to start Cassian as far from a hero as possible, building his performance backward and even adjusting his physicality over the course of the series as Cassian slowly grows into himself. “How fucked up can we find this character and how difficult can we make the journey for him?” Luna said. “It’s important that we start in a place where you can’t believe that that captain [in ‘“’Rogue One’] 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 gift of Luna’s performance as Cassian isn’t just a roadmap to the man he plays in “Rogue One.” The level of fear and darkness he invites us to feel through his eyes matters because the things he wants are so universal: stability, money, his family taken care of, and maybe a little revenge here and there.
Over the course of the series, those desires simply aren’t enough in the face of the Empire’s oppression. Luna based those hinge moments of decision for Cassian on the tangible details of what he has — or doesn’t have, once he lands in the Imperial prison system. “That’s the moment where he realizes he can become a leader. And it’s by wearing that suit,” Luna said. “It’s like you become part of the walls, in a way, and you look just like everyone around you, and it’s so uncomfortable. And shooting barefoot — it’s weird because for me, being barefoot is being connected to the Earth. It’s being connected to nature. But here it’s the exact opposite. It’s the fear of [the ground] being the enemy.”
Cassian’s arc is one of realizing just how unnatural the Empire is, but also that he has the capacity to fight it. Luna takes his performance from slouched and disheveled, ill-at-ease in his own skin, to spitting rage to resolute operative — or, at least, the Rebels’ new hope.
Weaving the Sophisticated Layers of Society
“Andor”‘” includes a number of characters, cultures, and planets that appeared in previous “Star Wars” movies and series, but from the start, costume designer Michael Wilkinson felt like Gilroy’s scripts called for something different. “The project was going to require a different type of ‘Star Wars’ costume than audiences were used to,” said Wilkinson. “Much more like a drama that is very adult-orientated.”
For Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), playing politician while secretly funneling money to rebel cells, Wilkinson devised an entire “Chandrillan”’” fashion style that expands on what the character is wearing during the original film trilogy and gives it some of the gloss the political elite at the heart of the Empire would undoubtedly have. O’Reilly wears the sharp silhouettes and geometric layering Wilkinson creates like armor. “She has this double life. It’s very, very precarious, and we wanted to get that sense of danger, if you like, into the way that she dresses,” Wilkinson told IndieWire.
For cosmopolitan Coruscant, Wilkinson created hundreds of silhouettes to capture a rich and diverse planet. “Coruscant is a planet we’ve seen in so many different installments of ‘Star Wars,’ but we had a chance to sort of use Coruscant to tell our story in the most clear way. We really wanted to get a sense of a tiered society,” Wilkinson said. “There were the movers and the shakers, senators and that sort of world of the high flyers and politicians at the embassies and at the Senate. But then as you go lower into the world where, for example, Cyril [Kyler Soller] and his mother [Kathryn Hunter] live and they have a little bit less light, things are a little bit more cramped, they have a few less resources.”
“Andor” is a gigantic costume lift across multiple planets, but Wilkinson uses texture, color, layering, and contrast to show which characters have something to hide and which characters stand out, even when in uniform. “Cyril wears his uniform where, on his own admission, he has done a bit of light tailoring and some customization, added extra piping and things to sort of give it the status that he thinks he deserves,” Wilkinson said. “Compare that to the way his boss wears the uniform, which is completely disheveled and schlumpy. It says a lot about the character, how the character presents themselves to the world, how they see themselves in the world, what their aspirations and priorities are. I love putting all of that thought into uniforms.”
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