After reprising his role as Star Wars villain Director Orson Krennic last year in The Bad Batch, it looks like Rogue One actor Ben Mendelsohn is eyeing a return to that galaxy far, far away for Andor Season 2. Just last weekend, Diego Luna — who plays the eponymous rebel in both Gareth Edwards’ film and Tony Gilroy’s series — teased to fans at ACE Superhero Comic Con that “there will be characters that you recognise” in the Peabody award-winning show’s second series. And now, in an interview with The Playlist, Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios — director of the last three episodes of Andor’s upcoming series — has let slip that Mendelsohn is among the recognisable characters fans can expect to see when the show returns.
Whilst singing the praises of his experience working on Andor, Ruizpalacios paid tribute to the heavyweight actors he’d had chance to direct on the show, specifically naming “Stellan Skarsgård, Forest Whitaker, and Ben Mendelsohn” among them. And whilst Skarsgård and Whitaker are familiar faces in the world of Andor, having played Luthen Rael and Saw Gerrera in Season 1, Mendelsohn’s Krennic has yet to make an appearance in the series thus far. But with showrunner Gilroy having told Empire last year that the final three episodes of Andor S2 will cover the three days before Rogue One, and with Ruizpalacios directing said episodes, the return of the Death Star’s architect at this pivotal point in the story makes perfect sense.
I really hope it turns out nothing like Game of Thrones. It feels like a relatively mature, intelligent take on the Star Wars universe that sheds alot of the stuff that kind of sucks about Star Wars now. It was really refreshing not seeing any Sith/Jedi, force users, or spoon-feeding dumb plot points in Andor s1, the last thing it needs to do is pull some dumb shit and forego logic just to subvert expectations.
I highly recommend checking out the other stuff from Tony Gilroy (the creator of andor).
I truly think that Rogue One and Andor is the best Star Wars yet - if I remove all the nostalgia bias and the fact that the original was revolutionizing back in 77. I hope that its not a bad thing that Krennick is reappearing. Andor was great because it stopped bringing in characters we’ve seen a hundred times just so people recognize their toys again.
Well, besides the meta aspects of GoT going to shit, it felt GoT-like in that we got a deeper story, and political intrigue.
That much is fair, but one of things I like is that while introducing some moral ambiguity and more nuanced storytelling, it doesn’t go too far and “un-Star-Wars” itself by drawing too close a comparison between the Rebellion and the Empire.
I don’t want all my literature to be morally didactic, but I do think Star Wars in particular is a set of themes and tones in addition to being a setting, and you can’t just go full House of Dragons and have everybody be awful.