SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments in Season 2, Episodes 1–3 of the Disney+ series “Andor.”
TRIGGER WARNING: This story includes a description of an attempted sexual assault.
If you look very, very closely at the inside of Adria Arjona’s right arm, you can see a small tattoo of an “X.” The actor got it on her last day of shooting “Andor” — Lucasfilm’s Peabody Award–winning “Star Wars” series, which launched its second and final season on April 22 with Episodes 1 through 3 — as a way to commemorate her performance as the strong-willed mechanic Bix Caleen.
“Bix transformed my career in many ways, and transformed me as a person,” says Arjona, who’s also starred on the second season of “True Detective,” as well as in “Morbius” and “Hit Man.” “It’s the first character that I’ve ever grown with. She’s taught me a lot.”
Bix is certainly going through it on the show. In the Season 1 finale, written by creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, she’s rescued by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) after suffering through debilitating torture at the hands of the Empire. When the Season 2 premiere picks up a year later, she’s living on the agrarian planet Mina-Rau as an engineer who is often referred to, quite pointedly, as “undocumented.”
While Arjona notes that she shot the Mina-Rau episodes a year and a half ago, the (unintended) relevance to the Trump administration’s relentless war on so-called illegals is not lost on her. “It’s just mirroring that we keep stumbling on the same rock,” she says. “It’s one of my favorite parts about the show. It’s relevant now, and it’s going to be relevant in five years and 10 and 20 and 50 years, because we keep doing the same thing.”
There is, perhaps, no clearer demonstration of that concept than the sequence in Episode 3, also written by Gilroy, when an Imperial officer, Lt. Krole (Alex Waldmann), shows up unannounced at Bix’s home when she’s alone and announces that he knows her immigration status — underlining the power he holds over her future.
“I’m always looking for ways to…relax,” he tells her. “My shoulders get sore. All that hard work, you must have strong hands.”
He takes her hand, and then pushes her up against a wall, forcing himself on her.
“You want to think this through,” he says, his face up against hers.
“Please, I’m begging you,” she replies.
“But it’s such a simple choice,” he says.
“I said no!” she screams, at which point she fights back, ferociously, smashing Krole’s head with a hammer, ultimately killing him. Any ambiguity about what’s transpired is erased when Bix shouts at another officer, “He tried to rape me!” It’s at once a harrowing new storytelling frontier for “Star Wars” and a method of oppression as old as human history.
“I remember reading that, and within the truth of that moment of the abuse of power, being really scared to go into that scene,” Arjona says. “But there was also something — I’m going to curse — really fucking powerful about the fact that I get to showcase this in a galaxy far, far away. The fact that Tony gave it to Bix was a big honor — and it was right. She’s in the most vulnerable state she can possibly be in, and someone tries to take advantage of her. We’ve heard that story many times.”
In the days Arjona worked with director Ariel Kleinman on Bix’s brawl with Krole, she says the “only thing that I really fought for” was Bix first breaking free by backhanding him. “There was something about backslapping somebody that is exactly what I wish my reaction would be if I were ever in that moment,” she says. “It just felt really liberating to be able to do that. I had a lot of women in my heart at that time. For any woman, for anyone, when you have a stranger, a male stranger, in your own space, everything becomes survival.”
Arjona was especially affected by saying the word “rape” in a “Star Wars” production. “The fact that I get to speak it out [loud] — I felt so much power in that,” she says. “I felt it throughout the day. I felt it when I finished filming, and I went home.”
So much of Bix’s storyline this season called on Arjona to dig deep within herself. Starting in the first episode of the season, she’s wracked with PTSD-fed nightmares about the auditory torture she suffered at the hands of the Empire, exacerbated whenever Cassian, now her romantic partner, is away on a secret mission for the Rebellion. For research, Arjona says she “went down this black hole” about people suffering from severe tinnitus “and how it affects your mental state.”
“I’ve had my fair share of panic attacks,” she adds, noting it’s been roughly five years since her last one. “Like many people, I’ve gone to the hospital thinking I was having a heart attack. So it was scary for me, going back into that headspace — but I was in a very safe environment. With all the research that I accumulated, I just hope that I could pay tribute to it. It was probably some of the hardest stuff I’ve had to do.”
Reflecting on the experience of making Season 2 brings Arjona back to Gilroy’s decision to cast her in the first place, and what it meant for her to join the “Star Wars” family. “Tony saw something in me that I didn’t even know I was capable of,” she says. “I remember watching ‘Star Wars’ and really wanting to transport myself into these universes, but I never really saw myself in it. So it means the world. We belong in ‘Star Wars.’ The more ‘Star Wars’ is expanding, the more it’s becoming a mirror of our real world, and it’s beautiful.”
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