Tony Gilroy Created His Own ‘Star Wars’ Endings and Aimed for ‘Legit Hope’

When Tony Gilroy and his Andor star Diego Luna decided to cram half a decade’s worth of new Star Wars lore into three episodes per year leading up to the events of Rogue One, they knew the task was unbelievably ambitious. In a chat with the Wrap, Gilroy expressed the excitement everyone involved felt over their great big heist of an entry into Lucasfilm’s Star Wars lore.

“We kept waiting for it to fail, going, ‘There must be something that’s going to bite us here.’ We kept waiting for a bugaboo that never appeared,” he said. “I wrote the top and the tail of each block to set the frame for each year. And I took that into the writers’ room so nobody could tell me that it wouldn’t work. And then we filled in from there.”

Now with the Disney+ series at an end and awards season kicking in, Andor’s mission is one fans would say really paid off for the critically acclaimed show. No one really cared that it didn’t tie into shows like The Mandalorian or Ahsoka and Gilroy wasn’t forced to embed any sort of direct lines to get more viewers to those shows.

“I paid rigorous attention to the canon that I’m supposed to pay attention to. I’ve ignored the canon that I’m allowed to ignore,” he stated, but that doesn’t mean his canon if off the table for other projects: “I don’t own the IP, so they can do what they want.”

Instead Gilroy was able to say goodbye to his characters on his own terms. He told the trade that key final moments such as Dedra’s face-off with Luthen, and when Andor meets a Force healer in probably the only time the energy which courses through Star Wars was directly mentioned, didn’t all come together that meticulously. “You spend so much time constructing and tearing down in your imagination. It’s just such a constant process,” he said about how the series still surprised him as they finished the last scene.

“I wanted to be able to not feel like a sadist with what I was doing with these characters and have some hope,” he said of the moment we see Bix in the field with her and Andor’s child facing out into the future; to Gilroy, that’s the close to his time with Star Wars. “Legit hope. Not cheesy T-shirt hope, but real hope.”

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.