Actors Denise Gough and Kyle Soller were over the (that’s no) moon about their character’s dark arcs in the second season.
In the end, they were Death Star-crossed lovers.
Romantics may have hoped that Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) would find a fairy tale ending during Season 2 of Andor, but the Imperial power couple were destined for more of a Shakespearean tragedy.
“We were fearful, ‘Are they just going to be in love?,” Gough tells StarWars.com. “[Creator and executive producer] Tony (Gilroy) laughed at me when I dared to suggest he would write something so juvenile.”
Instead, Gilroy and the writers crafted a deep saga with a lot to say about the moral toll of living under an authoritarian regime, a cruel normalcy that is as destructive as any planet-obliterating battle station. Imperial Security Bureau Supervisor Meero and ISB civil servant Karn were always doomed: Their first love was an Empire incapable of loving them back.
“The fact that there’s this bureaucratic element of the Empire was so unexpected,” says Soller. “I was like, ‘okay, that’s just amazing. I would never think that there are just people pushing papers. That’s exactly Syril’s story: He could be anybody and that’s what’s most terrifying, I think.”
In the early stages of the development of Andor, Gilroy considered an origin episode that would show a young Dedra growing up as a ward of the state in what would later become an Imperial kinder-block, Gough notes. So, she knew about Dedra’s unconventional childhood from the moment she buttoned up the uniform.
“He had said she had come from something really twisted,” Gough says. “And then they managed to do it in one line: ‘I grew up in an Imperial kinder-block.’ There you go. Now you understand everything. She grew up with no touch, no love, no care, nothing. She grew up in a regime.”
All that emotional baggage proved too much weight for a healthy relationship. Cue the awkward staring, secrets, and emotional manipulation. A sequence in which Dedra practices smiling only to manage a disturbing grimace apparently even made the episode’s director, Ariel Kleiman, uncomfortable. That was par for the course when it comes to the power-hungry couple.
Fortunately, the chemistry between Gough and Soller as scene partners was a lot healthier in real life.
“Denise is great,” says Soller. “We come from [similar] theater training backgrounds and she works really hard, she’s there for it. I think given two characters that are so weird… such challenged and challenging characters and then you’re asking them to potentially form a friendship, a relationship, a union…
“You think, ‘How in the hell are these two people going to come together?' They’re so strange and unemotional. And that was a really cool thing we got to explore in the final season.”
It’s a journey that would end in heartbreak, imprisonment, and death.
A Dinner Party for Three
At the end of Season 1, Syril rescued Dedra from the violent uprising on Ferrix with the pair sharing a spark that seemed to promise future fireworks. The steely-eyed bureaucrat had been fixated on the Imperial officer in part because of an even more unhealthy shared obsession: Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and the rebels forming under Axis.
As Season 2 of Andor opens one year later, the couple are on an upward trajectory both professionally and personally. Living together in a rather nice apartment by Imperial standards. at the start of the season Syril is enjoying a middle-management position in the Imperial Bureau of Standards. Dedra’s rapid ascension through the Imperial Security Bureau ranks has put her on the radar of Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), who has designs on uprooting the peaceful populace of the planet Ghorman as part of his secret project, which will become known as the Death Star.
“Syril is ever committed to his three obsessions: Cassian, Dedra, and the Empire,” explains Soller. “He’s still the Syril that we know. He’s never happy. He’s constantly striving to do better. He’s constantly seeking approval. Even though he has this new standing and he’s kind of relishing in that and showing himself off, changing up his style a little bit more. He still has his sartorial fetishes of course, but there’s still this under-current of real unease.”
That unease is at a klaxon alarm level during a dinner party that Syril reluctantly throws to introduce his girlfriend to a person obsessed with him — his mother. Syril would probably rather face down an armed legion of rebel soldiers than the sharp tongue of Eedy Karn (Kathryn Hunter).
But once Syril leaves the room to have his panic attack out of view of the two women in his life — a memeable moment of Karn awkwardly lying facedown on their bed — Dedra shows the officer she is, laying down a new set of edicts for Eedy’s access to her son. Far from being offended, the grand dame of Coruscant is impressed.
“These are two very dark women who control this man, deciding what this deal is going to be,” says Gough, laughing. “‘He’s out of the room, so let’s talk about what’s really going on here.’ And the way Kathryn looked at me, Syril’s mom is really enjoying this. What does she say? ‘Nothing delicate about you.’ It’s just next level genius.”
As twisted as it is, that dinner party is the closest Dedra and Syril stans will ever get to happiness before things get really dark.
The Ghorman Front
In the second arc of the season, we catch up with the duo one year later to find both involved with Ghorman, as Syril is now running a regional office of the Bureau of Standards. But Dedra had an ulterior motive in nudging her partner to relocate to the spider-silk producing colony: Infiltrating a group of potential insurgents that are secretly being set up as patsies. If a rebellion can be fomented, then the Empire has the pretext it needs to uproot the population and begin its secret mining operation.
Unfortunately, Syril doesn’t know the full extent of Dedra’s machinations until the following year (and the third three-episode arc), just as the Empire is about to spring the attack that will become known throughout the galaxy as the Ghorman Massacre. Syril, who has come to care about the cell he infiltrated, realizes he’s been an unwitting accomplice and lashes out physically.
On Andor, though, karma is as powerful as the Force.
As Syril stumbles into the town square in the midst of the chaos, he spies Cassian among the crowd. What follows is a brutal fight in which Syril somehow comes out on top, with a blaster aimed at his nemesis. But before he can pull the trigger, the bureaucrat sustains a painful blow to his ego when Cassian doesn’t recognize him. “Who are you?” Andor asks. Before Syril can wrap his mind around the indignity, he’s killed by Carro Rylanz, one of the Ghormans he betrayed.
At least he died doing what he loved: Attempting to murder Cassian Andor.
“(The way) I always talked about Syril is that he was in a state of becoming, but he didn’t know what, in the first season,” says Soller. “And in this final season, he’s in this state of arrival by the end.”
Meanwhile, Dedra is left with a broken heart and a commendation.
Just another year after her success in orchestrating the Ghorman Massacre, Meero is arrested by Krennic after botching the capture of the rebel leader Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård). Loyalty to the Empire is a one-way hyperspace lane.
“You want to be in a tribe, not a gang,” says Gough, “and poor old Dedra gave her life to the gang, and then the gang chewed her up and spat her out.”
Because Andor mines irony the way Krennic mines kyber crystals, Dedra ultimately ends up in a prison not unlike the one from Narkina 5 from Season 1. There, we can assume she will continue contributing to the construction of her former boss’s Death Star without having a way out or an end to her sentence.
“We did so many different [takes],” Gough says of her character’s tearful breakdown in the final montage that closes the series. “There was one where she ended up on the floor. There’s one where she’s screaming. For me, it was always about, she’s holding it, and holding it, and holding it and…the lights go out, and she’s gone.”
As Dedra is a survivor, we may see that awkward grin again one day. Gough certainly hopes so.
“Who knows? Dedra is in prison, maybe they will bring her out when she’s 80. You just never know with these worlds,” Gough says with a far warmer smile than her character could ever muster.
