Join Andor Creator Tony Gilroy for a Day at Lucasfilm

As the group made their way up to another area to (finally) find B2EMO, Gilroy reacted as if meeting an old friend. “Hello darling!” exclaimed Gilroy. Made by the droid department, the same team who built the original, this Bee has become a good luck companion for the San Francisco staff. Looking closely at the worn universe aesthetic present on all of the displayed props, GIlroy wondered aloud: “Is there a funk shop where you guys just decide on how to get ‘funk’ on everything?”

”Let’s finish up the tour with a Death Trooper,” said Hidalgo pointing them towards a towering statue of the black-garbed (and voice-garbled) baddies from Andor’s “sequel” film, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. “They were initially designed to match the work of Ralph McQuarrie’s original stormtroopers. He would draw them tall and skinny, just because that was his art style. So they tried to mimic that in Rogue One.”

As a final parting gift, Hidalgo gave Gilroy a copy of Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Chris Kempshall, a book published last year that many Andor fans have been visiting (or revisiting) after the show’s finale. “We made a book written by a real-world historian, charged by the real-world history of Star Wars.” With a book for the director, but not one for the actor, Tudyk quipped: “I saw an Emmy in a case back there, I’ll just go grab that.”

After the tour and several round tables with a handful of fan podcasts also invited to the office for the day, it was time for a special screening of “Who Are You?” the intense eighth episode of Andor Season 2. Playing to a crowd of employees and guests inside the Premier Theater, the Ghorman Massacre was rather astonishing to see on a big screen, with its sound design and visual effects on shattering display.

Afterward, Gilroy and Tudyk joined Skywalker Sound’s Margit Pfeiffer for a post-screening panel moderated by StarWars.com’s Kristin Baver. In a conversation focused especially on the series’ intense sound design, the trio navigated through their work on Andor landing on one key metric: mania.

As Gilroy put it, “The show is made by people who have been employees [of Lucasfilm] for a long time, so the real trick was to just let people be the maniacs that they wanna be. We encouraged mania. There were merit badges for mania in every freaking department.” One example that the showrunner highlighted was the incredibly complex (and incredibly practical) rhydo pump. The props department had calibrated nearly forty minutes of mechanism movement and individual features, which of course could not all be shown on screen without dominating a full episode. “It’s a mania show! I keep finding out things about the show!” Gilroy quipped.

“The attention to detail and the love that every single person brought to this project brought me incredible joy,” added Pfeiffer, who served as the series’ supervising sound editor. “Supposedly 2,500 people worked on this show, and every single person in every single department went above and beyond.”

Tudyk spoke as both a member of the cast and a fan of the show in general: “I think Andor is important. This is an important piece of art that is going to stand the test of time. I am so happy to be a part of it.” And Pfeiffer agreed saying, “ Thank you, Tony, this is really truly special.”

As the audience shuffled out, and the cast and crew went home for the evening, everyone was in agreement: Thank you, Tony Gilroy, for everything.