Andor Creator Tony Gilroy on Bureaucracy and the Surveillance State |
Science Fiction
Eric Boehm | 12.23.2025 11:00 AM
This week, guest host Eric Boehm is joined by Tony Gilroy, the creator, writer, and director of Andor, the critically acclaimed Star Wars series that reimagines the origins of the Rebel Alliance. While Andor is set in a familiar sci-fi universe, it stands apart for its focus on the mechanics of authoritarian rule.
Gilroy discusses how Andor portrays the Galactic Empire not as a cartoonish evil but as a bureaucratic system that centralizes authority, normalizes surveillance, and absorbs previously independent planets, corporations, and cultures. Rather than relying on superweapons or singular villains, authoritarianism in Andor functions through institutions, incentives, and ordinary people just doing their jobs.
Boehm and Gilroy talk about how these themes connect to Gilroy's earlier work, including the Bourne films. They also discuss how Andor approaches moral compromise, resistance, and responsibility, why it matters that fascists still care about mundane details like parking spots, and why the series has resonated with viewers interested in liberty, power, and the quiet ways systems enforce obedience.
The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by championing "free minds and free markets."
0:00–Introduction
1:23–Behemoth
3:21–Andor in the Star Wars timeline
5:04–Cassian Andor's character development
12:04–The moral compass of Andor
18:31–Constructing the authoritarian regime
22:05–The reality of bureaucratic institutions
25:04–Mass media representation in Andor
31:43–Exploiting loneliness and vulnerability
37:40–Would Gilroy return to Star Wars?
39:21–Gilroy's contributions to Rogue One
42:25–The Bourne movies and whistleblowers
46:10–What is the libertarian view of Andor?
53:48–Gilroy's origin story
57:08–Themes in Gilroy's work
This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Eric Boehm: Tony Gilroy, thanks for talking to Reason.
Tony Gilroy: Pleasure.
Now, you are probably best known—at least right now—as the showrunner behind the two-season Disney show, Andor. I don't think I'm overstating things here to say that it is the best piece of Star Wars media since the original trilogy, at least. And maybe even the best piece of Star Wars media ever made.
That show is a prequel to Rogue One, which I think we'll probably also talk a bit about in this conversation. You were involved in the writing of that movie as well, and that's also in the conversation as the best piece of Star Wars media since the original series. You're also the writer behind the Jason Bourne movies. We may get a chance to talk about that as well.
But you are joining us, if I'm not mistaken, while you're also in the midst of working on a new movie. So I want to start there. This is a production titled Behemoth, and you're shooting this—again, if I am not mistaken—with Pedro Pascal and Olivia Wilde. I am really excited about that. That sounds really cool. Can you tell us anything about the new one?
It's an original. It's about movie music. It's about a cellist that returns to Los Angeles to do studio work. I guess that's about all I'll say about it right now, until we get out to sell it, whenever we do. No, it's all about music. I've been living in music for the last year, and I'm fully immersed in it right now. I've been living in California. It's a very California movie. It's a Los Angeles movie. And we're a little over halfway in shooting, so you're catching me on the weekend of a busy time.
Well, we are very glad you made the time for us. That sounds like a nice break from Andor, honestly. After all the politics and the drama and the sci-fi-ness, to do something so grounded that must be nice.
It's really been a great place to hide out for the last 10 months, yeah, to live in music. It's escapist for sure.
That's nice. We all need a little bit of that. So let's talk about Andor, the show that is out there, that is now finished. The second and final season was released earlier this year to widespread critical acclaim. Look, there's obvious political themes to that show. This is a political podcast—we've got to talk about that.
You know, one thing that came up to me, I think, as I was watching that…well, I guess we should start here. I imagine most people are familiar with Star Wars and Andor if they're listening to this conversation, but just for anyone who isn't: Catch us up very briefly on where this is in the Star Wars timeline and how this show fits into the broader overarching story of good and evil and Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader—because it kind of doesn't fit into that story exactly.
Rogue One is the discovery of the plans to the Death Star that will lead to what people traditionally know as the beginning of Star Wars. This is the five years gathered around the main character of Rogue One, Cassian. One of the main characters of Rogue One, Cassian Andor. It's the five years of his life prior to that film.
Our last image, our last scene in Andor, is him walking into what would be the first scene of Rogue One. So it's a five-year tranche of history right before the destruction of the Death Star, and it is a five-year period where the Empire is sort of really tightening its grip around the throat of the galaxy in the most extreme way.
You were involved in writing Rogue One, which in a very similar way leads directly into the events of the first Star Wars movie. Now you're sitting down and writing a prequel to a prequel, and you have to get this one central character to the point that he's at in Rogue One, where Cassian is somebody who's willing to do literally whatever it takes for the Rebellion.
There's a lot of constraints there as a writer, I would imagine, to have to build this character out. How did you sit down and think about who he was going to be five years before—or two years before—and lay out that arc? What were you thinking about? Where were you getting inspiration from as you were writing Cassian's character specifically?
Well, it's two issues that you raise. One is the idea of limitations. Limitations are really good, creatively. Boundaries and limited materials or this is what you can work with. Any kind of restriction is usually very beneficial in the creative process, to fill that vacuum.
I was given a five-year— The setting is a five-year piece of history that has some very specific guidelines to it. There's a few canonical markers that happen that are well-established. I guess most notably would be Mon Mothma's departure from the Senate. Mon Mothma is a character Genevieve O'Reilly plays, and she's a big character for us all along the way. There's a moment in canonical history where she calls out the emperor for something called the Ghorman Massacre. And it was never detailed what the Ghorman Massacre was, but she's—
Just to clarify, this is a pre-existing thing in other Star Wars media that you had to write around.
Pre-existing canonical Star Wars, exactly. So what's the frame? So that's on the calendar. I have a couple of other events on the calendar. Things have to sort of line up. So that's the setting I'm given.
And then, dramatically—I mean as a creator, as a writer, as a dramatist—Cassian Andor in Rogue One was sort of an all-singing, all-dancing, brilliant warrior-spy. I mean, he kind of has the full complement of skills. There's nothing he sort of can't do. He can lead; he can seduce; he can lie; he can plan; he can adjust. He's an assassin. He can fly. He does all these amazing things with a great deal of low-key commitment— a very casual, comfortable vibe to it.
There was no backstory for that character before. He never existed before. So, dramatically, my approach was to say, "Well, if we're going to go back five years, why don't we put him as far away from that level of competency and commitment and accomplishment as you could possibly get? Let's take a roach and turn it into a butterfly, essentially. How far away could you take him from where he'll end up to make that journey interesting?"
That's my approach to how I did it. He's an entirely fictional character, and it's completely free-range what I want to do with it. But I have to put him in the maze of that very specific canonical framework and the rules of Star Wars and the cosmology of it that already existing, and the geography that's already existing, and the calendar. So I roll them back and find out who he is, back five years ago, and it's sort of a wind-up machine and you let it roll.
You mentioned that constraints can be really helpful creatively. One of the other interesting things about Andor is that it sort of leaves aside—maybe not entirely—the mystical side of Star Wars. There's a sort of soothsayer, fortune-teller-type character who pops up in the second season there, right? So there's a hint of that. But you really left that aside.
Was that something else you decided to do deliberately as a constraint for yourself? Or was that just a result of, "Hey, look, there's so many characters in this story already we can't also have a bunch of Jedi pop up somewhere?"
You have to think of Lucasfilm and Star Wars—I've said this many times before—as sort of like the Vatican, in a way. I mean, it has a curia, and it has a whole bunch of cardinals of various… Our attitude was: we're gonna take the Latin Mass out of the church. So we're gonna do it a different way. That was the mandate.
One of my original questions to them, to the experts there, was, "In the galaxy—in this huge galaxy—how many people would have ever encountered a Jedi? How many people would ever know about the Force? How many people know about this family you keep rotating these movies on?"
And the answer is: nobody, or almost nobody. If you're living in the galaxy, if you're a being in the galaxy, you've probably never had any encounter ever with Jedi or even know what it is, or the Force.
So that was my intention. Probably in the beginning, I was never, ever, ever gonna touch on the Force. We're certainly gonna do a show without lightsabers. And we'll certainly do a show that doesn't have anything to do with the same bunch of people that you've been dealing with all this time before.
But the Force… We worked on the show for five and a half years. Coming into the second season, there was a really cool way to touch it and have it help us and have it enhance our story. And I think really gets a fundamental emotional feel for it as well—I mean, something that felt of value to me.
So we touched on it. I liked the way we ended up doing it. A lot of discussion went into it, a lot of finessing of it. But yeah, we do touch on it a little bit.
But as I said, the concept of the show was to put it in the kitchen and get it out of the dining room, and just talk about what happens when authoritarianism and fascism comes kicking down your door, ordinary people, and you're forced to make a choice. A lot of people in the show are forced to make choices because of events. And that doesn't really involve lightsabers, and it doesn't really involve a spiritual dimension that will help you.
There's something that I actually wanted to ask you about that I think you're getting at right here. You did an interview with Ross Douthat at The New York Times a few months ago, and something that came up in that conversation but sort of got glossed over was: You described yourself as a moralist.
You said when you start writing characters—I don't remember if you were speaking specifically about this show or just more generally—[you are] "a moralist." And that sounds like what you're talking about here: that there is a moral compass to this show, to Andor, that the characters are dealing with. It's not necessarily a religious or metaphysical one, right? They're not contacted by the Force and told to do something or not do something, and then making a choice.
They're making choices for sometimes political reasons, but oftentimes like moral, calculated reasons here.
That was an interesting interview, because he was really trying to pin the show down and pin me down. And to analyze it in a way, but certainly put it in a place where I didn't feel comfortable it should go.
I think it's two different things again. One is what my job is as a writer and, again, as a dramatist. You have to just completely inhabit the people that you're writing about—in a generous way—to do it. You have to live through them. If you're writing anybody, you have to get inside them. Everyone's the hero of their own story, and everybody believes what they're doing.
I really wouldn't want to… I'm trying to think. There have probably been characters over time that I've judged as I've been writing them, a little bit, but it's really not a great place to be. I want to be free to let them all let their freak flags fly.
But I think when you're talking about the moralism, it........