Spoiler warning: This article discusses story details and plot points from key Season 2 episodes of Andor.
Their operatives “have friends everywhere,” but it’s the complex bond between Luthen Rael and Kleya Marki that helps deliver vital intel to the Rebellion.
After one of Luthen’s long-time undercover ISB assets, Lonni Jung, sends out an emergency call, things start to go downhill fast for Luthen and Kleya in Andor’s tenth episode. After years of living double lives secretly working against the Empire while publicly running a gallery in Coruscant, “Make It Stop” gives a backstory to Luthen and Kleya’s relationship intercut with Kleya’s gut-wrenching actions after Luthen makes the ultimate sacrifice to avoid Imperial interrogation.
Throughout both of Andor’s seasons, Luthen was shown to be a cunning, and at times ruthless, rebel insurgent, willing to risk his life and the lives of others for the larger goal of taking down the Empire. But Skarsgård was never shocked by his character’s behavior.
“No, no, not at all,” says Skarsgård. “I have to play the character as [someone who] believes in the revolution.” But Skarsgård also appreciates the moments in the series where his character shows moments of empathy, such as when Luthen visits Bix in the Coruscant safehouse. “Even if you play a hard guy like Luthen,” notes Skarsgård, “he doesn’t have to be hard all the time. And if he doesn’t have empathy, then he has got nothing to do in the revolution, because the reason for revolution is empathy.”
Luthen’s death in the series wasn’t a surprise to the actor. “I don’t think anybody in that situation thinks they’ll make it,” notes Skarsgård. And flashbacks, which show Luthen as an Imperial soldier rescuing a young Kleya whose homeworld is being ravaged, reveal how he would likely have never made it this far without her as his partner.
“In those flashbacks he’s sort of giving her the education of a revolutionary,” says Skarsgård. “Because he’s old military, he knows that kind of stuff. But she’s the one that is fierce. She’s twice as tough as he is, and you see that the way Elizabeth Dulau plays her grown up as well.”
The character of Kleya plays a much larger part in Andor’s second season, in part due to Elizabeth Dulau’s stellar performance in Season 1. Elizabeth looked forward to finding out more about her character along with the audience. “You have no idea who she is in Season 1,” notes Dulau. “She’s so shrouded in mystery. And I think mysterious characters are always compelling. It was enormously satisfying to revisit her and to get the answers to who she is.”
Dulau describes Kleya as a character who will fight against the Empire until the day she dies. And the flashback sequences helped flesh out her character’s motivations. “Her rebellion is revenge,” she says. She thought about the family Kleya lost and how that plays a role in her traumatic past. “That’s what fuels her. That’s what gives her the fire to keep going and become this formidable opponent to the Empire.”
It was important to show the complicated and conflicted feelings Kleya had for Luthen as she grew up. “It was key for me in developing their relationship that it is not a father-daughter relationship,” says Dulau. “It’s not that tender, heartwarming thing.”
The opposite side of that coin was the devotion to each other the pair developed over the years. “He spends every day after [they meet] effectively protecting her,” Dulau says. “And she protects him and that becomes their life. They are so reliant on each other.”
Kleya spent much of Season 1 of Andor in the background, which fit the image the actress had for her perfectly. “She’s cultivated that persona because she wants people to underestimate her,” she says. “Her power lies in being completely underestimated and overlooked. I think that’s something that we all do. We all sort of code switch and become different versions of ourselves in different situations.”
The episode “What a Festive Evening” sees the tense dance Kleya forces upon ISB officer and rebel spy Lonni during a party hosted by Chandrilan banker Davo Sculdun, in which she struggles to remove a recording device under the nose of ISB Director Orson Krennic. Kleya works with many tools this season, from a brooch that acts as a lockpicking device to key cards she hands off to operatives. But the hardest one for Dulau to master was also the most important: Kleya’s hidden radio. To capture the comfort and ease Kleya needed while operating the radio she uses to communicate with operatives and spy on Imperials, Dulau equated the action with driving a car where so much of the physical movements of pressing your foot on the gas pedal or turning the steering wheel become instinctive over time.
“That radio is like Kleya’s child,” says Dulau. “She has built that piece by piece over several years. She knows it inside out, back to front and sideways. And [director Ariel Kleiman] wanted to give some of that impression. He wanted Kleya’s hands to dance over this radio like she could do it with her eyes shut.”
As Imperials close in on Luthen and Kleya, Skarsgård and Dulau agreed that Kleya was key to ensuring things didn’t immediately fall apart. “She’s not moving one inch,” notes Skarsgård. “And my character is sort of starting to wobble a bit. She’s firmer.” From Kleya’s perspective, Dulau sees the panic her character felt after years of seeing only strength from Luthen. “When Kleya sees Luthen dithering a bit, it’s actually terrifying for her. It rocks her sense of who they are for each other. But Kleya never likes to show fear. I think her immediate coping mechanism, her immediate defense mechanism, is to go to anger.”
She describes Kleya’s infiltration of the hospital to end Luthen’s life to save him – and his secrets – from Imperial torture as a human-sized game of Mouse Trap where Kleya is the mouse and Luthen is the cheese. Kleya barely speaks in these sequences, in which every movement was technical and heavily choreographed to be just right.
The pair’s last moments together echo some of their first where Luthen tells Kleya to bottle and store the hate she feels for the Empire until she knows what to do with it. “And I think what helps Kleya do what she has to do in that moment is all the hate she feels for him,” says Dulau. “She’s been bottling that for 17 years.”
But along with the hate is the tension of the love she’s also been suppressing for Luthen. “And it just bursts through her,” she continues. “It’s all that love that she feels for him that is screaming at her in that moment to not do this. But it’s through all that love that she has to keep pushing to do it. She doesn't want to leave him there on that bed, but she has to tell herself she’s got to run because she’s got to get that message back to Yavin. She can’t get caught.”
At the end of her journey on Andor, Dulau notes what an impactful experience the series was for her so early in her career. “I said to [Stellan] I will never forget skulking around the galaxy far, far away with Stellan Skarsgård. All my life, no matter what jobs I go onto, I will never forget this.”
