Luthen’s Episode 10 Backstory, K2S0 Returns

On Tuesday, Disney+ dropped the last three episodes of “Andor,” wrapping up the series and directly setting up “Rogue One.” It’s not typical that a television show needs to pass its baton to a film made almost a decade earlier, and “Andor” creator Tony Gilroy did not want to approach the show’s final episode in a typical way, either.

While on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Gilroy talked about fighting against the need to incorporate one final big decision or turning point in wrapping up the series heading into “Rogue One.”

“Episode 12 is really its own thing where we didn’t put a lot of pressure to jack anything up,” said Gilroy on the podcast. “This is kind of a ‘deliver the pizza’ episode, and the pizza is emotional, and everybody settled into it, and we took the pressure off ourselves.”

Gilroy specifically wanted to go out on a hopeful note. “Andor” Season 2 was about the personal sacrifices and impossible choices characters faced in taking on the cause of the nascent rebellion, and the series creator felt as if “Andor” had earned the right to end with a measured note of optimism.

“We’re really putting the audience through some amazingly difficult journeys [of] what time does to people that hopefully you care about, and [what] time, under these really extreme circumstances and these extreme adventures that they’re on, does to them,” said Gilroy. “So there’s a lot of attrition at the end. There’s a lot of sadness at the end. But really, in the end, this is the beginning of ‘A New Hope.’ What’s going to come out of this is the phoenix of the Rebellion.”

The last three-episode cycle “Andor” also saw K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk) back into the fold, returning to the prominent supporting role that the modified KX-series security droid plays in “Rogue One.” It’s a move Gilroy purposefully delayed and left to the series end. As Gilroy explained on the podcast, his initial involvement with “Andor” was as a friend to the franchise, giving notes to Lucasfilm on its initial plans for a “Rogue One” prequel series. In addition to his advice to take a “back-to-the-studs” approach to Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) arc, which would become the basis of his own series, he highly recommended they abandon their ambitious plans for K-2SO.

“I was saying, I don’t think you can have K-2 all the way through this show, which they kept wanting to try to do because that was the, ‘Let’s have a Butch and Sundance’ show,” said Gilroy of the initial plans to have Cassian and the droid go on 40-episodes worth of missions together — a proposal that reminded the “Rogue One” writer of his own story struggles with K-2. “He’s the worst piece of luggage in the world. He’s not a spy, you can’t take him undercover, he’s seven feet tall. KX units are so inhibiting. If you watch ‘Rogue’ with that in mind, how many times is he is not allowed to get out of the ship, or ‘I have to wait here and do something.’”

In a series which, at its core, is about supplying an emotional understanding of what brings characters of all stripes to fight a fascist Empire, Episode 10 is arguably the holy grail of “Why We Fight” Rebellion backstories: Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) and Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau). Gilroy said very early on he knew he would explore Luthen’s backstory, and was saving it for a key storyline of the stealthy underground leader for near the end of “Andor.”

“I had a variety of backstories that Stellan and I spoke about early in the first season,” said Gilory. “The one thing he didn’t want was he didn’t want revenge. He said, ‘I don’t want it to be a revenge story. I see that in some of the other characters, and I think that’s the one I don’t want.”

The ultimate Episode 210 storyline, and the incorporation of Kleya, as an almost adopted daughter, into Luthen’s backstory, was motivated and inspired by the talents of Dulau. Gilroy and Skarsgård had both been impressed by the previously unknown actress’s talents, and wanted to give her and the character the opportunity to spread their wings before saying goodbye.

“Elizabeth Dulau, who plays Kleya, was such an incredible surprise. It’s her first job. She came right out of RADA, and we had a couple of actresses who were signed up for that part, who got offered other things along the way, and we let them go. And suddenly we have this young actress [who we don’t really know,” said Gilroy. “[Her] audition’s very good, and her scenes are very good, but how good is she? And oh my God, you start to realize what someone can do. She’s a Meryl Streep. I mean, she’s just astonishing.”

To hear Tony Gilroy’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview at the top of the page or on IndieWire’s YouTube page.