On ‘Andor,' All Is Fair in Love and ‘Star Wars'

New York Times

22-04-2025

What attracts two people to each other? Are they drawn together by a mutual need for companionship, affection and emotional support?
Or are they united by their individual yearnings to advance their own positions and consolidate power in a tyrannical empire that is building a moon-size superweapon?
In the Disney+ series 'Andor,' the answer turns out to be a little from Column A and a little from Column B, at least in the case of one of the stranger — yet undeniably compelling — relationships to emerge in the 'Star Wars' fantasy franchise: the frustrated pencil pusher Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) and the ruthless security officer Dedra Meero (Denise Gough).
Their pursuits are often nefarious — against their perceived enemies and also against each other. And although their give-and-take may have lacked the smoldering looks and snappy banter of, say, Princess Leia and Han Solo, Meero and Karn became a subject of fascination for viewers of Season 1, who watched the power dynamics ebb and flow in the characters' often awkward relationship.
As their story continues to unfold in Season 2, the first three episodes of which debuted on Tuesday, the actors portraying them and the show's creator, Tony Gilroy, are taking stock of the characters' journeys — what it says about the underlying themes of the series, the nature of couplehood and the possibility that there might be someone out there in the universe for everyone.
'Somehow, Tony saw in he and I these two little weirdos who find each other,' Gough said of her and Soller's characters.
When viewers first met Karn, he was a fastidious but hapless deputy inspector obsessed with capturing the show's title character, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), a thief and spy who will rise to become a key member of the rebellion in the film 'Rogue One.' Karn's failures cost him his security job, and he crash-landed into a gig as a government flunky at the Imperial Bureau of Standards, a division of the sinister Galactic Empire whose tentacles have spread across the cosmos.
At his new post, Karn crossed paths with Meero, an ambitious supervisor in the Imperial Security Bureau whose assignments included torturing suspected rebels. The fumbling Karn was drawn to her as both a potential romantic partner and an embodiment of the Empire he worshiped. The calculating Meero saw Karn as both a means for her own advancement and a bumbler undeserving of her attention.
Gilroy, who was a writer of 'Rogue One' and reportedly oversaw reshoots and editing, said that Karn and Meero had emerged from his brainstorming process when he was first planning 'Andor.'
Knowing that he wanted to start with Andor committing a murder, Gilroy (whose other films include 'Michael Clayton') said he felt it would have been 'a crime against dramatic nature not to have a pursuer — the concept of a Javert, the concept of an Ahab.'
That pursuer eventually became Karn.
Gilroy's son, Sam, meanwhile, had turned him onto the rancorous scenes of infighting among the Imperial officers in the earliest 'Star Wars' movies. 'Some of them are really cool,' Gilroy recalled thinking, though the sequences focused only on male characters.
'I thought, We should really have the distaff side of the story,' he said.
That led him to Meero.
Gilroy found his actors for both roles on the stages of London and New York: Soller, who is American, in the Matthew López play 'The Inheritance,' which ran in both cities, and Gough, who is Irish, in the Duncan Macmillan play 'People, Places & Things,' which did likewise.
Soller said that he appreciated how Gilroy's earliest 'Andor' scripts depicted the 'soul-crushing nature of this massive corporate evil structure' that Karn was part of while giving the character 'an interior life that I'd never seen before.' In the scenes that he was shown, 'you get to see him having breakfast with his mom,' Soller said. 'It was like a Pinter play being written out in the 'Star Wars' universe.'
He did historical research, likening Karn to any number of people from the World War II era, whom Soller described as 'normal people — normal is in quotes — who got caught up in fascism, who got swayed by fear and their own insecurities, their lack of understanding and lack of empathy.'
Gough said she saw Meero as focused, implacable and ambitious, and that she found her way to the character through written dialogue, physicality and instinct.
'It's kind of weird, because I don't really think a lot,' Gough said of past roles she has played. 'These women arrive and they do whatever they do. With Dedra, she just showed up.'
Then during production, Gough said, she got a fateful note from Benjamin Caron, an 'Andor' director. As she recalled, 'He said, 'Put your hands behind your back,' and I did that. And I was like: Oh, great. Suddenly my face is doing things that I didn't think about.'
Gilroy said that as the writing of 'Andor' progressed, some sort of collision between Karn and Meero became inevitable, an illustration of two different kinds of people who would be drawn into an authoritarian system like the Empire.
'I think what I'm getting at with them, ultimately, is the conflict between the romantic vision of authoritarianism and a zealot's version of it,' he said. Karn is the naïve fantasist who sees Meero as his path to a better life — 'he's grown up in a box, why wouldn't he fixate on her?' Gilroy said — while Meero is the hardened true believer who can't decide if Karn is worth a womp rat.
In a scene from Season 1, a blindly devoted Karn waits for Meero outside her office, intending to pledge himself to her cause. She warns Karn that she could have him arrested, but rather than run off, he answers: 'I want what you want. I sense it. I know it.
As Gilroy explained the scene, 'There's a little bit of daylight where she's thinking, 'Oh my God, no one ever talks to me like this — maybe I like this?' He does ring her bell a little bit, and then he goes too far.'
Then, in the Season 1 finale, Karn saves Meero from the wrath of an angry street mob. Trembling, she says to him, 'I should say thank you,' and he calmly answers, 'You don't have to.'
The characters were left at a critical juncture, and it was clear where at least some 'Andor' fans wanted them to go next. As Gough recalled: 'I went to a Comic-Con, and people had made patches of Kyle on one side and me on the other, inside of a broken heart. What is it the young people say? Shipping? I'm getting shipped.'
But behind the scenes, Gough said, she was wary of any story line in which Karn's rescue of Meero led them to a conventional romance, and she expressed this to Gilroy: 'I was like: 'So, what, she just gets saved by a bloke? Is that what we're going to do?'' she recalled. 'He was like, 'Seriously, you think that's the story I'm going to tell?''
The earliest episodes from Season 2 of 'Andor' reveal what became of Meero and Karn after his act of heroism. (Details from these episodes are about to follow — stop reading if you want to avoid Imperial entanglements or spoilers.)
In Episode 2, we learn that the two have settled into a domestic relationship, one in which their contrasting desires and personal pathologies are still in conflict.
As Soller explained: 'They're so hungry for power and for control, but then the demand of relationships is one of the most intimate and terrifying places to exercise control and power. So, of course, they would do that.'
Despite the reservations she had expressed, Gough said she could understand why Meero would now want to couple up with Karn — if only to keep tabs on him. 'He saw me at my most vulnerable,' she said. 'So I need to keep an eye on that, because I don't want that out in the world.'
And in Episode 3, the couple's dynamics of dominance and subjugation are further explored through another relationship rite of passage: a meal at home, where Karn introduces Meero to his mother (Kathryn Hunter). It becomes the backdrop for a battle of wills between the two women.
Without going into further detail, Soller said he could relate to Karn's dilemma here. 'I've been in that scenario,' he said. 'You completely regress, and you go collapse on the bed for five minutes, or you need to use the bathroom for a quick 10 and look at yourself in the mirror.'
Gilroy offered some words of warning about how much the story of Meero and Karn had to say about real-life, earthbound relationships, even as a cautionary tale. When he is plotting the course for a series like 'Andor,' Gilroy said, he has no specific agenda other than to explore 'what would be dramatic and what might be truthful behavior and what would be fun.'
It is only when he discusses these creative choices in retrospect, he added — a 'purely forensic' exercise, as he had put it — that he is 'forced to go a little bit more analytical about what might be happening.'
Scrutinizing his characters at this level can reveal only so much about romance: 'It's a bit like an autopsy,' he said.