“Andor” exists as a black sheep, as it was arguably much more a Gilroy project than it was following the mold of recent franchise habits and trends. Ironically enough, one of the biggest selling points of “Andor” as a show is the fact that its showrunner doesn’t have any nostalgia for “Star Wars” as a brand.
Gilroy, who notoriously was brought on as a script doctor for “Rogue One,” was approached by Lucasfilm with the explicit goal of making something new. “I obviously didn’t come with a huge ‘Star Wars’ resume. It wasn’t my go-to Friday night. I’m not beholden to a lot of other things,” Gilroy admitted to RollingStone. “You don’t bring me in unless you know what I’m gonna do — and I gave them a good idea of what I was gonna do. So the mandate was to do something completely different.”
Despite being known as the mind behind the “Jason Bourne” franchise, Gilroy claims that strict genre boundaries are not on his mind when he starts new projects. As a creative, he hopes to eventually land on the tone and feel of his work naturally:
“I didn’t really think of a genre. I knew [why] they were hiring me: ‘Oh, it’s a spy thing. A guy who did ‘Bourne’ movies. He’s gonna be a spy guy.’ People know that I can write action, so they knew that there would be action and things like that. We’ll take care of all that stuff and we’ll do it in an original, cool way, but they don’t really know what they’re asking for, and at the beginning I don’t really know what I’m trying to get.”
