TONY GILROY: All these rebellions get to the point where someone lights a match and then everything changes. And then once people are committed and once people have tipped over in a way, it’s quite extraordinary in history how people once tipped over, go all the way.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast. I’m your host, Gabe González, and today we are talking about one of the most exciting and honestly terrifying shows around, Andor. It is a grounded, realistic look at the daily horrors of living under a fascist government and the depths of sacrifice at all levels it takes to foment a revolution.
Oh, and it is set in the Star Wars universe. Yeah, that’s right. There’s room for giant talking blobs and a searing critique of fascism in this galaxy. Today, the Peabody’s own Jeffrey Jones is talking to the showrunner and writer who brings the rebellion of Andor and the related film, Rogue One to life: executive producer Tony Gilroy.
And later in the show because we just couldn’t get enough, I debrief with Jeffrey about his conversation with Tony. We dig even deeper into the themes of totalitarianism, the surveillance state, and how what happened a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, relates to what’s happening in the U.S. at this very moment. You know, just some light banter. So ditch shows Lightsabers and X Wings in favor of a textbook on the Russian Revolution because on this episode, there’s only one way out.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. Our guest today is prolific screenwriter, director and producer Tony Gilroy. His work includes The Borne Identity and Rogue One. Most recently, he’s created and executive produced the Disney+ show Andor, a critically acclaimed part of the Star Wars franchise, which is now gearing up to premiere its highly anticipated second season. So kick back and join us for this deeply insightful conversation with Tony Gilroy and We Disrupt This Broadcast executive producer and Peabody Words executive director, Jeffrey Jones.
JEFFREY JONES: So I’m here with Tony Gilroy. Tony, welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast.
TONY GILROY: What a pleasure to be here.
JEFFREY JONES: So Andor is in many respects, a different story than is typical for the Star Wars universe. Instead of the royal families of Skywalker and Palpatine, and the story of good versus evil, Andor is focused on the Empire as a totalitarian regime with all of its brutality and control that is a fascist state. So as a writer, why was that an attractive story for you to tell?
TONY GILROY: I didn’t come into the project with any kind of agenda. I came in and I looked at it and I said, oh my God, I got five years of history to play with. There’s certain things that happened. I know the ending of my story because I worked on the film where the ending is. It just so happens my character is going to end up being a revolutionary hero in a way, and a rebel of consequence.
So my starting point is to say, well, if you want me to do a show about a guy who ends up being the sort of ultimate rebel war fighter, I want to take him back to the farthest place possible from that, that I can. I’m like, okay, let me start with that. How big a hole could I put him in five years ago and have him climb out of and get there?
So I start there. And I work on that for a bit, and then suddenly all this useless historical information that I’ve gathered, all the popcorn history that I’ve eaten, is suddenly, has great value, and it grows from there. It grows from the characters, and it grows from the minutiae and the really small things, and each character.
And as long as you have an understanding of what the background should be and you have a historical context for what you feel about it, it’s my God, all of a sudden it begins to reveal itself if you go small to big. If you go big to small, I don’t know how, I don’t know what gets revealed to you. I think then you’re sort of digging holes in the ground and looking around. My process is very much planting a little tiny thing and letting it grow, and then, oh my God, look where I am and look how that relates to this, and that’s my process.
JEFFREY JONES: Well, you’ve teased my next question, which is, we learned in our research that you are a student of the Russian Revolution and the Haitian Revolution.
What did those moments of mass resistance and overthrow teach you about humans existing under oppressive regimes or human desire for change through violent resistance?
TONY GILROY: Man, if you go on Wikipedia, they have a list of every revolution and rebellion there’s ever been. And it’s one of the most endless Wikipedia entries I’ve ever seen. I mean, it starts from the very beginning of time, the Roman Revolution and the Greek Revolution, Charles I, I mean, there isn’t a year. There isn’t a moment that goes by where someone isn’t ruining everything for enough people that they don’t wanna deal with it anymore.
And so, the French Revolution I’ve probably done an autodidactic deep dive on that, I don’t know, half a dozen times in my life. And the Russian Revolution has been fascinating for my whole life, and The House on the Embankment and all those books on the show trials and all that stuff. If there’s any kind of past life, I must have been there because I feel very plugged into that.
But our revolution. They all, they’re all unique. It’s like families, right? They’re all unique and they’re all the same. And so I’ve been able to just sort of catalog shop history in a horrifying way all the way through the whole show. That’s what I’ve been doing. You know, there’s comps all the way through our, the second season that we’re coming out with now, the first year was basically the making of a revolutionary. It took the whole year for Diego Luna’s character, Cassian Andor to become a revolutionary. He starts off as a, I mean, he couldn’t be more cynical or disinterested or apolitical. By the end of it, he’s a committed revolutionary, and that’s sort of his indoctrination.
But the second half that’s coming out this spring is the four years that take him to his ultimate fate. And that’s about the consolidation of an organized rebellion, and the factionalism within it, the difficulty of coalition in many ways. And I’ve really, it’s been very helpful to know the things that I know or at least know where to go back and look for what I need to look for.
JEFFREY JONES: It’s been fascinating for me to watch it a second time of season one, and very much look forward to the April 22nd debut of season two. But I wanna talk about kind of ideology. I think we often believe that revolutions are driven by ideology, and that is certainly present in the character of Nemik who writes a manifesto and comes closest to any character in the series in articulating an ideology of freedom from oppression. Let’s take a listen to Nemik in this clip.
CLIP: Andor
There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone. Unsure. Dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this, freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere, and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this, the imperial need for control is so desperate because it’s so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks. It leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this: the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the empire’s authority, and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this.Try.
JEFFREY JONES: But for much of the series, this stands in contrast to people who are driven not by ideology or manifestos as by the sheer cruelty and indiscriminate violence of the empire, that is by their own personal experiences. So can you help unpack that tension for us? What drives resistance to oppression? And what did you hope to articulate with these dual tensions?
TONY GILROY: That’s a really interesting question. I mean, were there time and space, and if I felt that it wouldn’t be taxing the audience too harshly, it probably would’ve been interesting to have that kind of debate happen. And Sas Gerrera has always been presented as a real militant outlier, and that’s a canonical element.
And we had him in Rogue. And so he’s this Che Guevara out there in the fringes causing trouble. And Luthen’s obviously an inside manipulator and a consolidator. There will be some other slight philosophical conversations that happen in the second season, but I do think that ideology only takes you so far in every revolution I’ve read about.
It really is the, as you said, the harshness of the cruelty or the injustice or the, you know, the eminent domain that’s stealing people’s property or I was reading about the Luddite movement in the United Kingdom and like I didn’t know anything about it. And it’s like people just got, machines were taking over their lives and ruining a utopian sort of economy and people were just, they tried and tried.
And, you know, authority is so often deaf and inept. And finally, all these rebellions get to the point where someone lights a match and then everything changes. And then once people are committed, and once people have tipped over in a way, it’s quite extraordinary in history how people once tipped over, go all the way.
JEFFREY JONES: Absolutely. Well, speaking of Nemik, maybe we should address the elephant in the room of this current moment in the U.S. At one point, Nemik says to Cassian, in season one, “the pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it.” And that’s the real trick of the imperial thought machine. It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident. So is this one of the key factors that make oppressive regimes so successful? By bewildering people through the sheer pace and enormity of change?
TONY GILROY: I think that’s a modern, I think that’s a 20th century component. I think that’s a new tool in the arsenal of authoritarianism. I’m not sure whether anybody in Haiti or anybody in Rome was really checking their texts and going, wait a minute. Have you seen this? What the hell is this? Now, the weapons of authoritarianism are again, though matched by, that same ability to communicate and spread information becomes a tool for revolutionaries as well. But that is a 20th century and certainly galactic upgrade for fascism, I suppose.
JEFFREY JONES: Well, to that end, how does it feel that season one of Andor ended up being so prescient to the current moment?
TONY GILROY: The digestive system of storytelling in Hollywood is always years behind the inception point. It takes so long from the moment of first contact with the idea or the script to the release, you’re almost doing Carbon 14 dating on where you were. So this whole show was conceived and built a long time ago, and this second season, in fact was, I mean, with the strikes and everything, it’s been a very long time.
So any really specific prescient coincidence, and there probably will be some, they’re not intentional. They weren’t intentional at the time. They’re sadly what they are. And we were not looking at the newspaper when we wrote this. It doesn’t behoove me to do that. It’s incredibly, almost narcissistic how people feel that they’re always living at the edge of history in a way that’s just so unique. We feel so special.
And the sad truth is that, you know, we are just in another wheel of history. And I must admit that after 9/11 and Vietnam and Covid and Watergate and all the things I’ve grown up, I’m 68. I kind of thought, well, I’ve seen all the history I’m gonna see. I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t feel so special anymore as a human who’s lived on the planet and lived in something called civilization. I think sadly, it’s sort of a Catherine Reel of repetitive stupidity.
JEFFREY JONES: Well, if it makes you feel any better, the beauty of a powerful text that endures time is that audiences are the one that activate feelings of identification at various levels. And it just happens to be a text that is resonating again. So good timing on Andor season two coming out.
TONY GILROY: Or bad time. Yeah. I’m not sure, but we would like the show to speak for itself. I don’t know how this will evolve as events and interviews go on, but this is me walking that high wire. Yeah.
JEFFREY JONES: Sure. Well, a friend of mine said of Andor, it actually has a theory of power, not seeing power as simply the force or the dark side, which is to say power is more about how the structures of oppression force people into sacrificing their very humanity to combat it. So we have this character Luthen, who’s been aiding and funding and guiding the rebellion, and he gives this really powerful speech in episode 10 that articulates this nicely. Let’s take a listen.
CLIP: Andor
And what do you sacrifice?
Calm, kindness, kinship, love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I made my mind a sunless place. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion– I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield my, my eagerness to fight has set me on a path from which there’s no escape. I yearn to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I look down, there’s no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my, what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burned my decency for someone else’s future. I burned my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. The ego that started this fight will never have a, a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything.
TONY GILROY: To me, that’s the variety of sacrifice. I mean, he sacrificed everything. And what the show-. You know, you live through these characters while you write this stuff. You really do. I think everybody’s had to confront the varieties of sacrifices, the people who fail at sacrifice. Our story is as much about people who are cowards and people who don’t do the heroic thing, or people who try to shave it and try to negotiate with that.
Luthen’s use of power, te’s a classic Accelerationist. That’s his revolutionary dictum. You know, I gotta make things really bad so that people are really oppressed and the more oppressed people are, they will rise up. And so he’s in the pain, he’s from the pain side. There are other people in the show who are not from that.
But the use of actual power, I don’t know. I’m more into, I think I’m more into, and I think I’ve done this my whole career is, the illusion of power as a tidy structure. If there’s an overriding philosophy to everything I’ve done I think it’s that human behavior kind of leaks through anything we put in its path and it rusts out everything.
And I think the power that I’m representing in the show is my true feeling about it, which is it’s just a bunch of people, and they have their own needs and they have their own fears, and they have their own cowardice, and they have their own careerism. And you know, they’re just as, the Nazis in this show are just as interested in getting a corner office as they are in any aspect of profession, it’s careerism.
And I think that’s encouraging on one level, but incredibly sad. It’s really what looks like monolithic conspiracies or incredibly powerful organizations. It’s just a bunch of people and they make mistakes. And if you get in the seams and you put some water in there, you throw some maple syrup in the engine, it just all falls apart.
JEFFREY JONES: Yes. And social class, I want to explore. You know what’s wonderful about Andor is that revolutions aren’t just the plebs and the streets, but there’s also an upper class. And you guys articulate that very well. And it’s interesting, I think some of the narrative is the social class thinks wealth can insulate them from the impact of the rise of the empire.
But we also see how important it is to have rich benefactors funding rebellion. So I assume that was very intentional on your part to try to explore the different class differences there?
TONY GILROY: Well, the classic one is easy, that wealth will insulate you and that the protection of wealth, that’s the one that we all understand, and that’s the one that’s the most prevalent, obviously.And I mean, that gives you all of the fuel for the French Revolution. I mean that dominates the conversation.
But aren’t you fascinated by the early Christians who were, you know, Imperial class who like became converts and secret converts, and the wealthy Tories who became American revolutionaries, or the people that go against their class, and certainly the Russian Revolution is full of that.
So we have obviously Genevieve O’Reilly plays Mon Mothma, and then her cousin, Faye Marsay, who’s playing Val, these two women are of the highest class possible of Chandilan royalty, really, and they’re both as hardcore as you can get. I would’ve felt I had failed if I didn’t represent that color of the spectrum in there.
JEFFREY JONES: What about seeing things from the side of the empire? You know, we empathize with Dedra Meero as the only woman in the room and the kind of mistrust and misogyny up against her as the only female ISB agent. Why was it important to show that willing and enthusiastic members of the Empire are human people too?
TONY GILROY: I mean, that’s just the job. This is just a pure empathy business. I’m fascinated by the influences that lead people to make these horrifying decisions against themselves. I mean, I think that’s one of the craziest things that we see now, and I think it’s the thing that gives so much horror to people looking is, we seem to be in an era where so many people are willing to live in exile of what they really believe or believed.
There was this great movie called Max about Hitler that was out many years ago, and it’s about young Hitler at the moment where he’s like, is he gonna become a painter or a beer hall speaker? And John Cusack plays an art dealer who’s, a Jewish art dealer who’s trying to get him to expand his mind a bit.
And I don’t know if the movie’s true, but it emotionally feels so real that if someone had just shone the right light or pushed the right push or the right piece of encouragement, he would’ve been a shitty painter for the whole life and none of this would’ve happened.
I think that’s what fascinates me. How do people get where they are? How do people make decisions that they know are wrong? You’re doing the wrong thing. Why are you doing it? I keep working it, and writing versions of it. I don’t know if I really understand it, it still baffles me.
JEFFREY JONES: Andor is really unlike any other Star Wars narrative. So we have the debut on April 22nd of season two. I know you’re probably limited in what you can tell us, but are there broader themes that you explore in season two that you can share?
TONY GILROY: We are very much gonna explore the concept of how, how do you scale up a revolution? Luthen, Stellan Skarsgård’s character, who’s a really central sort of organizer, he is a guy who for, and you’ll find out a lot more about him and his origins, but you know, for 15 years has been like a guy in Silicon Valley.
He’s been building a machine in his garage. And now all of a sudden as this show starts, he’s going public. How do you take paranoia, secrecy, trade craft, how do you expand that out? How do you collaborate with people? What happens when people start to do that? That’s a really big theme.
And then as that happens, what is time? What does time do to the people that we care about? We’re gonna carry these characters. I have about 25 characters that are core characters that we’re carrying forward. What’s gonna happen to these people over time? What it does to people who’ve made really difficult decisions, what it does to people who’ve fought so hard and are losing, or people who’ve lost everything or people think they’re winning, or just the attrition.
I’ve never had a chance to play that music before. And there’s a lot of romance. I mean, it’s a ripping yarn. It’s an adventure story, really. I mean, we’re having a very high level, a very classy conversation here, but there’s a lot of tension and intrigue and adventure in the show. I mean, a lot. If you’re sensing that we’re really proud. I’m saying we, because there’s so many people that worked on this with me, but we’re very excited to show it.
JEFFREY JONES: Well, instead of asking you what’s next for Tony Gilroy, I’m gonna go back and ask how did Andor the experience of two seasons of Andor change you as an artist?
TONY GILROY: Oh my God. I’ll tell you, honest to God, I never thought that I would be this old and writing this well. I am writing better than I ever wrote in my life. I wrote a script while we’re in post. I wanted to write a movie. I wanna come back and direct a movie, and I wrote a movie. And I’ve had a chance to write every day for almost six years, five and a half years. But literally writing almost every single day, tweaking, doing stuff, writing, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. Everything that comes off my desk gets shot.
In a screenwriter, a successful screenwriter’s life, 80% of the work you do doesn’t get made. Doesn’t get made. I have a whole shelf of scripts here that I’m looking at, most of which have never been made, and the best ones never made. To be in such good shape, to have such good actors, and you write something and you know it’s gonna be shot and you know they’re gonna do it well, and you just.
Can’t help but get better and tighter and stronger and more accurate and less bullshitty. And man, you just, it made me a better writer. At this late date. It’s a little late, but I’m gonna try to keep coming for a while.
JEFFREY JONES: Well, we really look forward to seeing season two. Tony Gilroy, thank you so much again for being with us. We so appreciate this conversation and truly, best of luck.
TONY GILROY: All right, man. Thanks for the Peabody Award. It really helped us out. Anyway. Really nice to meet you.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That was Peabody Award-winning creator and showrunner of Andor Tony Gilroy in conversation with our very own Jeffrey Jones. When we come back, I’ll chat more with Jeffrey about Andor, and its extremely timely themes as well as what sets it apart in the Star Wars universe as two self-proclaimed Star Wars nerds.You won’t wanna miss this. Stay tuned.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. I now have the pleasure of chatting with our executive producer Jeffrey Jones. Not only is he the Peabody Awards executive director, he’s also a professor of politics and media, which makes him the perfect person to unpack the themes that make Andor such a compelling watch. Check out our conversation.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Hi Jeff. It is so much fun to be joining you after that interesting conversation with Tony Gilroy. And I wanna pick your brain ’cause I know we’re both Star Wars nerds, is that correct?
JEFFREY JONES: Oh yeah.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Okay, great. Some of our listeners might make fun of me, but one of my first experiences was waiting in line for The Phantom Menace. It was the first Star Wars movie that came out while I was alive. I’m sure experiences might have been a bit different with the franchise.
JEFFREY JONES: Yeah, I’ll date myself by saying that I was a projectionist in a theater that showed The Empire Strikes Back. So yeah, we go a long way back.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: The funny thing is, I was gonna make a joke about how you probably were a projectionist when it came out and you beat me to it. You actually were. I love that. I really do. Well it is a franchise that spans, I think, many generations. And it’s insanely popular. But right now we’re talking about Andor, and I’m wondering what is it about Andor that is so special as part of the Star Wars universe? What makes this story in particular rise to the level of a Peabody, in your opinion?
JEFFREY JONES: For so many people who are fully immersed in the story world, every iteration that’s new is welcome. But with Andor it really didn’t ask you to be familiar with the royal families or The Magic or Lightsabers or Ewoks. It was just a tale of a repressive regime and people who’d finally had enough.
And that makes it sound simple. There’s nothing simple about Andor. But it was much more universal in its telling of authoritarianism and rebellion. And so from a Peabody perspective, you know, people who weren’t familiar with the franchise could easily watch it and go wow, that’s really compelling storytelling.
And even though it’s science fiction in some sense, it’s also very contemporary. I mean, if you think about it, the movies treat the empire almost like a caricature of power, whereas in Andor we really get to see and understand and feel the depths of some of the characters who carry out the empire’s bidding. And what are some of their motivations and humiliations that they experienced in working their way up?
So really what we’re talking about here is the Disney franchise has really used television to its fullest effect to get at what does it mean when you have these types of systems in place, and then what does it mean for the people who are the subjects of that?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, as you said, Jeff, I think this series particularly gives us a lot of insight into the day to day, the everyday humiliations of people, the desperation, right, of not just your economic conditions, but of potentially being imprisoned or enslaved to do labor for the empire, right? The version of the Star Wars universe we’re getting in this series feels so much more human and so much more grounded because there is so much at stake.
Was there anything that surprised you during your conversation with Tony when he described, kind of, generating this journey or this character, something that you found a bit unexpected in that conversation?
JEFFREY JONES: He has a line where he says, “authority is often deaf and inept.” And it’s a really interesting observation from his studies of history to realize that when you really have total power, you really don’t have any ears for understanding or even caring that what you are doing is having the effects it is. And that there’s just kind of an ineptness of, we can do whatever we want whenever we want.
And I think even Cassian at some point says, “the empire doesn’t play by rules.” And I think that what is being often said is that raw power is sowing the seeds of its own demise, precisely because it’s deaf and inept. And I thought that was a very prescient observation on Tony’s part.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I think there’s another component to the Andor of it all, which is the audience. And I’m wondering if you could unpack this idea of the audience activating meaning for the show, how the moment the audience interacts with the story, be it on a critical level, or even just, you know, with the intention of entertainment. What’s that dynamic like for you?
JEFFREY JONES: Well, as you know, I’m a professor of media and we talk about a word, a $5 word called polysemy, which is “many meanings.” And any text carries within it, you know, what the producers intend. But it’s really the most important point of meaning making is in the audiences themselves.
And so, as Tony said, you know, we constructed this text a while back, but for better or worse, season two of Andor is landing, and even season one, is being read by people in 2025 when there has been a seismic change in the political culture of this quote unquote democracy we’re in. And so people will read into it their present situation, and that’s just the nature of people making meaning.
And so when you have a text that’s very much about authoritarianism, fascism, and rebellion, and they’re looking around their newspaper and their daily lives, or their lost job, or you know, workers being deported willy-nilly, it’s real easy for them to see these corollaries between fictional texts and their real lives.
So, you know, for better or worse, this is a tale that has great resonance at the moment. And I do believe that audiences will be basing their enjoyment or lack of enjoyment precisely because it does speak to the moment we’re in.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. As you mentioned, your media studies professor, I’m just wondering off the fly, do you think Andor as a series is in conversation with any other media that you’ve seen recently?
JEFFREY JONES: You know, it’s not about authoritarianism, but I do think one thing that Tony and I didn’t talk about, which I wish we had, is surveillance. And that is the empire has all seeing eyes. What’s so compelling about the Empire Officer is just how effective she is in its surveillance. And that is such a modern thing that we’re experiencing is, when something happens, power knows it. Surveillance is everywhere. So I would think a lot of episodes of Black Mirror go well with this, precisely because technology and surveillance is so ripe that we’re still trying to make sense of how can those with real power use these types of technologies to control us.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: That’s so interesting. Surveillance is, as you mentioned, one of the newer accoutrements of totalitarianism or fascism. But another one Tony mentioned was the onslaught of cruelty, that you can disorient a population or overwhelm a population with so much cruelty or so much overwhelming news and drastic change at once, that they kind of lose sight of what to keep their eyes on or what’s worth combating and what’s kind of like a red herring.
Again, seems appropriate for the moment, but it is interesting that in his historical research, Tony noticed that is a much more 21st century phenomenon. I believe he mentioned, he was like, I don’t think the Romans were looking at text updates on their phones being like, oh, what’s going on here? Right. There was time to digest things as they happened, and now it’s the totality of everything going on, can feel overwhelming.
JEFFREY JONES: We certainly have a better ability to know what’s happening at a distance quicker. But there’s never been a shortage of power indiscriminately doing 40 atrocities in a day. Which Nemik says in his speech, Steve Bannon called it flooding the zone with shit. He’s not just talking about propaganda. He’s also talking about if you do so many things, that there’s no way for people to keep up and be outraged at any single thing. And so that has always existed. The Romans were really good at doing that with great, you know, aplomb.
They could slaughter lots of people in lots of places. And while the information of such things may travel at a slower pace and an awareness, the outrage still builds. And I think that’s a fundamental thing that Tony kept saying is it just takes finally someone to light the match. And you never know what that’s gonna be.
You know, there’s a lot of pin up anger across history about race in this country, but there was a video of George Floyd and it did unleash quite a bit of reaction as a result, even though that’s kind of trying to be rolled back at the moment. So, you know, the lesson from history is, while we aren’t special, while this has happened a lot, there are dimensions that are very similar to previous periods that could have great resonance in the current moment.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Jeff, thank you again for that amazing conversation with Tony Gilroy. It was really fascinating, very insightful.
JEFFREY JONES: It’s good to geek out.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely always.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thanks again for joining us on today’s episode. Our conversation with creator Tony Gilroy provided some fascinating insight into some of Andor’s most interesting themes, because for all its timely critiques of fascism and its mirroring of our own revolutionary history here on earth, Andor embraces the sci-fi elements of the Star Wars universe to color its revolutionary story with possibility.
It’s a grounded, gritty series about what happens when people reach their breaking point under an oppressive regime, but it also offers us an opportunity to imagine. To imagine what distant planets or journeying through the stars might feel like, or perhaps more impossibly to imagine what it might be like to start a revolution.
Well, as you might know by now, the Peabody Awards are decided unanimously. So to close out our episode, I bring you the We Disrupt This Broadcast’s unanimous decision where we unanimously pick the most disruptive line of the day:
TONY GILROY: There isn’t a moment that goes by where someone isn’t ruining everything for enough people that they don’t want to deal with it anymore.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I’m Gabe González. Make sure to join us on our next episode where we’ll speak with Jen Statsky, showrunner and co-creator of the Peabody Award-winning series Hacks.
JEN STATSKY: There is deep down a recognition and an understanding that they are, you know, kind of twin flames in the sense that they’ve both been cast aside by the industry. And that was also really baked into the premise of the show, that it would be about these women who are cast aside, fighting for their dignity to get back in.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production hosted by me, Gabe Gonzalez, with on air contributions from Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. The show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Bethany Hall. Producer Jordana Jason. Writers: Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producer: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Dreyer and Tunishia Singleton. From PRX: the team is Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Edwin Ochoa and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.