🎧 Designing Rebellion: Pirates, Rebels & Untold Stories of 'Andor'

The Star Wars series' costume supervisor, production designer and composer reflect on how they ran with creator Tony Gilroy's directive

WALKING THE WALK Diego Luna stars as the titular Cassian Andor on the Star Wars prequel drama Andor. (Lucasfilm Ltd.)

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Kate O’Farrell, Luke Hull and Brandon Roberts all grew up loving Star Wars. So for O’Farrell, joining Disney+’s Andor as costume supervisor was “exciting,” and for Roberts, stepping in as the composer for season two was “a dream come true.” Production designer Hull, however, was more skeptical — a prequel in a tightly guarded Disney franchise didn’t exactly scream creative leeway. Four years later, though, “It's been one of the most creative jobs I've ever had,” he says. And it all stems from what Hull remembers to be creator Tony Gilroy’s initial pitch: Join up “if you want to be a pirate and do something different with it.”

In a conversation moderated by four-time Emmy-nominated cinematographer and director Michael Goi, ASC, O’Farrell, Hull and Roberts detail how they collaborated with Gilroy to build the world of his acclaimed Star Wars spinoff series. The two-season drama, set before the events of the 2016 feature Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, follows Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) as he grows from smuggler to a stalwart of the rebellion, along with an ensemble of nuanced characters on both sides of the galactic struggle.

WATCHFUL EYE Creator Tony Gilroy and star Genevieve O'Reilly as Mon Mothma on the set of Andor. (Lucasfilm Ltd.)

The second season of Andor goes to some pretty wild places — from a politically driven massacre to a hospital break-in. But Hull says what sticks with him are the ideas they didn’t pursue as much as those they did. O’Farrell still dreams of costuming a “huge background number” on Ghorman, a silk-rich planet and a site for fashion designers. Roberts regrets missing the chance to score a scrapped “Alien-Predator-esque sequence on a spaceship.” And Hull notes a scene, conceived but rejected, with Dedra (Denise Gough) and Syril (Kyle Soller) meeting for the first time in a “revolving restaurant loosely based on the Death Star — it was a big glass orb with a view of Coruscant skyline, and every floor rotated within it.”

He adds: “It was kind of super trippy, and that whole scene would have played out in that before we realized that it's just bonkers.”

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