Andor: Tony Gilroy explains the five-year story of the Star Wars prequel series

Now that Obi-Wan Kenobi has come to an end, it’s time to start the hype machine for the next Star Wars series. Diego Luna has returned to play Cassian Andor for the Rogue One prequel series, and it’s going to be quite the sprawling tale.

Andor creator Tony Gilroy spoke with Empire about the upcoming Star Wars series and laid out how the epic five-year story will play out over the course of two seasons.

The scale of the show is so huge. Directors work in blocks of three episodes, so we did four blocks [in Season 1] of three episodes each. We looked and said, ‘Wow, it’d be really interesting if we come back, and we use each block to represent a year. We’ll move a year closer with each block.’ From a narrative point of view, it’s really exciting to be able to work on something where you do a Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then jump a year.

“Andor will explore a new perspective from the Star Wars galaxy, focusing on Cassian Andor’s journey to discover the difference he can make,” reads the official synopsis. “The series brings forward the tale of the burgeoning rebellion against the Empire and how people and planets became involved. It’s an era filled with danger, deception and intrigue where Cassian will embark on the path that is destined to turn him into a rebel hero.” Each season of Andor will consist of 12 episodes, with the first season of the series exploring the first year of Cassian Andor’s transformation into a revolutionary, and the second season covering the four years before the events of Rogue One. Empire has released a new image from Andor featuring Diego Luna as Cassian and Stellan Skarsgård as Luthen.

Diego Luna has teased that Andor will give us a much more character-focused story. “Rogue One is more about an event than the actual journey of [the] characters,” Luna said. “It’s quite amazing to start a show where it’s not about where we can end – it’s about, how did we end there?” Andor will debut on Disney+ on August 31st.