Andor Season 2: When Will The Star Wars Series Return?
Andor Season 2 is coming for Star Wars on Disney+ but the Diego Luna series won't release until at least 2024.
It didn’t seem like it would be the case, but Andor Season 2 could be the follow-up franchise fans have been waiting for. Season 1 of Star Wars: Andor was a surprise and much-needed hit, not only for Disney and Lucasfilm but for those who were still trying to remove the bad taste that was the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
Two things came from Andor Season 1. The first was that Star Wars stories could be told with grit and didn’t have to focus on the force. Second, and maybe most importantly, we find out early on that, yes, characters in the Star Wars universe actually do have sex.
So, what will Andor Season 2 have to reveal? There’s a lot to dive into with this series.
STAR WARS: ANDOR FOLLOWS CASSIAN BEFORE ROGUE ONE
There is a great chance that Season 1 spoilers are coming your way, so if you haven’t had the pleasure of watching Season 1 (do yourself a favor and watch it), proceed with caution.
Season 1 of Andor offers 12 episodes of surprisingly mature Star Wars content. It tells the story of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and how he went from a scavenger and thief to becoming one of the main players of the Rebel Alliance attempting to take down the Galactic Empire.
The series is set five years before we were first introduced to Cassian Andor in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and also the same timeframe that leads up to the original Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.
If you have seen Rogue One, you ultimately know the fate of our hero, Andor, but thankfully, it is going to take time to get to that ending.
ANDOR SEASON 2 WILL BE THE LAST IN THE SERIES
This fact was pretty much a given from the jump. There were a number of reasons for Star Wars: Andor to comprise only two seasons. The main one is that it takes such a long time to put these seasons together that it’d be difficult to keep star Diego Luna looking as young as he does in Rogue One.
For this reason, Andor Season 2 will include a number of time jumps so the series will line up with the beginning of Rogue One.
“It’s not possible, but you know what? It’s not because of us,” stated Luna via Collider. “It’s because of Rogue One. I mean, I also have to look close enough to Rogue One. Can you imagine me in 10 years pretending to be the [character] I was 20 years ago? Just impossible. I mean, sadly there’s no machines or CGI that can do it.”
Luna went into further detail as to what has gone into just the first season of Andor and how much time it has taken him and series creator/writer, Tony Gilroy, to put it together.
“We didn’t want this to end up being an animated series. I am who I am, and Tony Gilroy has to be the writer of this. We cannot be doing this for 10 years. Basically, the first season took four years. The second will take a little less, but he has to write 12 episodes.”
He continued, “Then we have to go [into] pre-production. That normally takes six to eight months to build these places and to start with the whole process of designing, casting. Then the execution is another seven [to] eight months, and then post-production starts. That’s not easy either. So it’s a long journey. Each season takes three [to] four years of my life and of Tony Gilroy’s life.”
ANDOR SEASON 2 WILL HAVE 12 EPISODES
The goal, according to Luna, was to have a five-season storyline, but as the series began to get mapped out, they realized that it simply wouldn’t do. “[O]bviously at the beginning we said like, ‘It’ll be great to do five seasons.’ This was before COVID, long ago. But once we started, and we decided it was going to be this story this way, it was pretty clear that it would’ve been impossible to do five seasons of this.”
He went on, “So Tony came with this amazing idea because we were already breaking it in blocks, in four blocks, four blocks of three episodes. That’s how we shoot. So each director gets three episodes and shoots that as a movie in a way. So Tony said like, ‘Well, if we’re missing four years, and we have four episodes, it could be perfect because it’s going to be like movies that would have a beginning and an end.’ Each year will have a beginning and an end, and it would be a chapter of three episodes.”
Andor Season 2 will start one year after the Season 1 finale before it jumps to explore one-year timeframes in Cassian Andor’s life, eventually leading to the beginning of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
When Rogue One: A Star Wars Story entered the Star Wars lexicon, it was met with both critical and fan appreciation. It came after the highly anticipated but thoroughly underwhelming Star Wars: The Force Awakens and told a story that we knew but didn’t know, ya know?
Rogue One introduced several characters whose fates had already been determined, mainly Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso and Diego Luna as Cassian Andor.
ANDOR SEASON 2 WILL, AGAIN, USE THREE DIRECTORS
Unlike the other Disney+ Star Wars series, such as The Mandalorian, the first season of Andor took a different tact when bringing in directors to handle the 12 episodes.
Whereas Season 1 of The Mandalorian used five directors and Season 2 used seven, Andor brought in three directors to handle blocks of the series. Susanna White was given the helm for three episodes, Benjamin Caron was also given three, and Toby Haynes received most of the work behind the camera as he took on six episodes. Continuity here was the key.
Andor Season 2 will be following that same pattern over its 12 episodes. Gilroy was happy to announce the three new directors that will be handling the Season 2 duties with Janus Metz and Alonso Ruizpalacios getting three episodes each while Ariel Kleiman follows in Toby Haynes’s footsteps with six episodes. Kleiman’s six, as was Haynes’, will be split into blocks of three.
DIEGO LUNA AND OTHERS WILL RETURN FOR THE SECOND SEASON
Seeing as that we have the foresight to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, we know for certain that Diego Luna, Duncan Pow, Forest Whitaker, and Genevieve O’Reilly will be a part of Andor Season 2, the remaining cast members are still an unknown.
One character who we know for sure will not be returning (unless in a flashback) will be Maarva Andor, played by Fiona Shaw. Maarva was Cassian’s adoptive mother who he lost in Episode 11, which causes Cassian to return to his home planet of Ferrix.
Based on the Season 1 finale, it appears that rebel spy Luthen Rael, played by Stellan Skarsgård, should continue to have a major role along with his associates Vel (Faye Marsay) and Cinta (Varada Sethu).
That final episode also saw Andor’s friends – Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), and Brasso (Joplin Sibtain), along with droid B2EMO – somehow escape Ferrix from the attack by the Empire. It had Andor claiming he’d meet up with them again one day, so we can assume that they will also be a large part of Andor Season 2.
Of course, you can’t tell a good Star Wars story without a great villain, something that the Star Wars sequels were sorely lacking. But in the case of Star Wars: Andor, they have two.
Kyle Soller’s Syril Karn and Denise Gough’s Dedra Meero look to return for Andor Season 2 and possibly combine their talents as they plan the destruction of the Rebel Alliance.
ANDOR SEASON 2 WILL END WITH THE BEGINNING OF ROGUE ONE
Ever since it was announced that Andor would only be a two-season run, we knew the ultimate ending. Things would eventually lead to Rogue One, we just didn’t know the path they’d take to get there.
The first season was pretty much the introduction and growth of Cassian Andor, detailing how he went from thief to rebel. But Andor Season 2 looks to change things up a bit, as series scribe Gilroy promised to Rolling Stone.
“The first year is really about him becoming, and the last line of this tranche of 12 episodes will sum up where we’ve been trying to get to. And we come back a year later. It’ll be very different…The next four years [of the story] are not about becoming a revolutionary. They’re about learning to be a leader and how difficult it is to put the alliance together and what happens to people who are the original gangsters versus the establishment and a lot of different other issues.”
Gilroy also promised that although Andor Season 2 will have the necessary time jumps, the series will be just as intriguing as the first season. “What becomes interesting is now we can play the negative space. When you jump a year, what happened in between? You know the people, you know what their trajectory was. It’s energizing,” he continued.
“People grow up and people get tired and people betray each other and people change their minds and people get weak and people get crazy.”
It was also revealed by Gilroy that the second season of Andor will align more closely with the main Star Wars Skywalker Saga as the story gets closer and closer to its inevitable end. He also dropped another hint by saying who is new to Andor’s writing team.
“Tom Bissell is really cool and really, really interesting, versatile, really good writer,” he said to Collider. “But also a very, very, very big Star Wars fan, which we really wanted to make sure we had another pro because we’re going into Rogue [One]. We’re going to Yavin, and then we’re going into places where we eventually need to really weave our way back to the source.”
ANDOR SEASON 2 DOES NOT HAVE A RELEASE DATE
As you may be able to imagine from what Diego Luna has said previously, it takes time to put each season together and while the second season is currently in production, it doesn’t appear that we will get a glimpse of it until beyond 2024.
True, that is a long time for fans to wait for an Andor Season 2, but there is no doubt it will be worth it. In the meantime, we always have Season 1 along with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to prepare us for what comes next.
