Tiffany Hanssen: This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hanssen, in for Alison Stewart. Thanks so much for spending part of your day with us. We are sure grateful you're here. Coming up on today's show, we are going to talk about board games with Tim Clare, the author of Across the Board: How Games Make Us Human. We'll hear a live in-studio performance from singer, songwriter Sir Woman, and we want your suggestions for New York City day trips. That's the plan. Let's get started in a galaxy far, far away.

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The Emmy-nominated Disney+ series Andor is set in the Star Wars universe, but it is not the one of Darth Vader, the Force, or Baby Yoda. It tells the story of a man named Cassian Andor. When the series opens, he's a thief. As he attempts to evade the empire's authoritarian law enforcement, he draws the attention of a man named Luthen, a leader of the nascent insurgency. By the end of Season 1, Cassian has joined the resistance. Yes, Andor is, as I said, in a galaxy far, far away, but this is not a space opera. It's a look at how fighting fascism requires total sacrifice. Here's how the rebel leader Luthen Rael, and I hope I'm saying that right, played by Stellan Skarsgård, puts it.

Luthen Rael (played by Stellan Skarsgård): I've given up all chance at inner peace. I made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago, from which there's only one conclusion. I'm damned for what I do.

Tiffany Hanssen: Season 2 of Andor is out now. We are talking with Tony Gilroy, who is an Academy Award-nominated director and screenwriter. He is Andor's showrunner. Tony, hi, welcome to All Of It.

Tony Gilroy: Nice to be here.

Tiffany Hanssen: Also here, in-studio, is actor Stellan Skarsgård, who plays the revolutionary leader Luthen. Hi, Stellan.

Stellan Skarsgård: Hello.

Tiffany Hanssen: Listeners. We are very much going to try to stick to themes here and avoid any spoilers, so don't worry about it, you don't need to run for the dial. If you are familiar with the Star Wars universe, and at this point I'm not sure who would not be familiar with it, Andor is set before the original trilogy. Tony, put Andor in the context for us, will you, of the Star Wars timeline when it takes place.

Tony Gilroy: Andor has a five-year tranche of very specific history that leads into the film Rogue One, which leads directly into the first Star Wars film. It's a prequel of a prequel. It's centered on the five years of Cassian Andor, who will be the spy warrior leader of the mission in Rogue One and will ultimately sacrifice himself to get the plans for the Death Star.

As you said, he starts as a thief, and it's the five years that take him up until the moment of Rogue One. Our final scene in the show- no spoiler here- we've been saying it for a long time, the final scene will be leading you directly into the opening of Rogue One.

Tiffany Hanssen: Speaking of prequels, I have for you, Tony, a general question about it, which is prequels seem predestined in that, as you said, you know where you're going to end up. You're going to end up at this particular scene. I wonder if that feels like a constraint to you.

Tony Gilroy: I'm going to give you an answer that I've been giving for a while. The suspension of disbelief is baked into us, I think, as animals. We all know we're going to die, and we get up every morning and we do things and we move forward. There seems to be some really potent ability that we have to be in that kind of denial. Why will you watch a movie a second time or a third time? Why will you do anything where you know the outcome, why is why, and how? Pulling understanding from that seems to be something that doesn't lose its potency by knowing the ending.

Tiffany Hanssen: What did you find so compelling about Andor's story arc?

Tony Gilroy: The canvas, the size of the canvas. I've been a screenwriter for a very long time. The life of a screenwriter is very much dictated by the number 130 or 125. Your eye is always in the right-hand corner. You've got so little real estate to deal with, you're always up against the page and the clock. This was kind of the equivalent of being a short story writer for your entire life and all of a sudden being offered the chance to write a gigantic Russian novel, in effect. The scale of the canvas, the scale of the resources, and the topic.

I've been an amateur, dinner table, bedtime historian buff my whole life. I've been reading all about. I spent a lot of time reading about revolutions over the years. You accumulate all this knowledge, and you don't have any place to use it. All of a sudden, there was people saying, "We'll give you 1,500 pages to play with and 2,500 people at Pinewood, and we'll let you run." It's a story about revolution. How much can you talk about that? For all the reasons not to do the project, those were so compelling, it was impossible to not get involved.

Tiffany Hanssen: This is the Star Wars universe. There are many, many people- speaking of doing a lot of reading- who have encyclopedic knowledge of the Star Wars universe. I do not have that. People that can spew out the number of languages spoken, planets mentioned, and worlds dived into and not dived into. I'm wondering, Stellan, how did you or did you go into the entirety of the Star Wars canon and say, "All right, I need to learn some of this"?

Stellan Skarsgård: Well, I've been in the Star Wars canon since 1977, when my first son started watching it. I've been watching it through the decades with eight kids, so I have it up to my ears. This was something else. This was really interesting, not only because, as Tony says, it's written from a historical perspective, in a way, it's the real revolutions, it's real oppression, and it's real words. If you see it, Luke Hull, who's made the scenography for this show, all the worlds are tangible. Don't say spoiler, but you've seen by now Mina-Rao, there's that yellow rye planet. There are people living on them, and there are different cultures. It's an amazing world.

Tiffany Hanssen: I was one of those kids in 1977, standing in line with my cousin, waiting to see the film, the first one that came out. It blew my mind. It 100% blew my mind. It changed me, and I knew it was going to change a lot of things. Did you have that sense at the time, Stellan?

Stellan Skarsgård: I don't know. I was very busy with changing diapers. I watched it and oh, wow, I'd never seen anything like it in that sense. The only science fiction of any value I've seen before that was 2001 by Kubrick. This was a continuation in one way.

Tiffany Hanssen: And you, Tony, taking you back to--

Tony Gilroy: I saw it in '77 in Boston. I was 18, 19. The most memorable thing was what an event it was. You can remember the films that were events in your life. It wasn't just going to the movie. It was a thing, like going to see Apocalypse Now at the Ziegfeld when they put the speakers in, and Avatar. It had an extra halo on it that was very exciting.

No secret, in the subsequent years, I followed along. I watched Empire Strikes Back and saw some of the films, but I wasn't an aficionado of it at all.

Tiffany Hanssen: How much did you dig into the canon before this?

Tony Gilroy: I had my tiptoe is I worked on Rogue One. I came into One as a clinician, as a doctor. Very different experience. Not emotionally involved, it wasn't mine, but I spent 10 months there and got to know the world. The easiest way to think about it is if you think about it as the Vatican, really. There's a curia and there are people that keep canon. There are all kinds of levels of canon within the Star Wars world, and they're very difficult to sift between. Literally, there's five, six, seven different levels of canon. Cartoons, books, the movies, and the-- There is a curia there. Actually, Pablo Hidalgo is the keeper of the keys there at Lucasfilm, and so if you have a question there about the veracity of something or the logic of it, he can answer it or tell you that you're free to make something up.

I learned everything I needed to know to tend the garden of the five years that I was given. I have a five-year period that I know a lot about. I know a lot about the calendar in there. I know a lot about the ins and outs. It's a very exciting five years because it's the rise of authoritarianism, it's the rise of a rebellion in a whole bunch of different pockets around the galaxy. There are certain key beats in there that are helpful to organize it. I'm an expert on those five years.

Tiffany Hanssen: I want to get into some of the specifics with you about your character here in a second, Stellan, but just one last question, Tony, about these folks that know so much about Star Wars, that live and breathe this. Do you feel the weight of their expectation on you?

Stellan Skarsgård: I know a lot about them. I learned a lot about it after Rogue. You ignore them at your peril. The really interesting thing about the super passionate Star Wars community is number one, they're the reason we can make the show. That deep passion, that's sort of the down payment on the ability to mount a show of this scale, to know that that audience is going to be there. They're not a monolithic viewpoint. Within the community there are an incredible variety of subsets.

We could talk for hours about the Star Wars community and their passion. I will say that the reason that Stellan and I have been on the road so hard and the reason we're doing things like this is one of the really most difficult things we're trying to do is trying to get people who are Star Wars averse. We're trying to let people know that, as Star Wars as we are--

Tiffany Hanssen: The been there, done that.

Stellan Skarsgård: Yes. You don't have to know anything about Star Wars to watch our show at all. The show is designed to that purpose. That one could come in. Really, along the way, it's been gratifying to pick up an audience that doesn't come with a handbook. You don't need to know much to start.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, Stellan, doesn't that just speak? We'll talk like he's not in the room here, but doesn't that just speak to Tony's genius in creating this story?

Stellan Skarsgård: He's done an incredible work. It's full of blood and life. Sometimes Tony says that it's not about now. You could drop it down in any time in the last 6,000 years of human experience and it would be up to date. It's true. It has all the political nuances. It's a great job. He's also made all the characters multi-dimensional and very mysteriously-- he doesn't explain the characters.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes. I want to ask you about your character. Speaking of not explaining characters, there's not a lot of backstory given about your character.

Stellan Skarsgård: No. You don't need it.

Tiffany Hanssen: Do you need it?

Stellan Skarsgård: No, I actually hate it.

Tiffany Hanssen: Why?

Stellan Skarsgård: If the backstory is on the page, it's one thing, but it's not. If it's not on the page, you immediately start to limit yourself. You're trapped by what's already written. I think one of the worst things an actor can say, I think, "Is my character wouldn't do that," because I immediately say, "How do you know?" Because man is a mystery.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, Right. I was thinking about backstory, and thinking, let's pretend I gave you my backstory and told you to play me. You might not come up with anything that looks like me or acts like me or talks like me, but it has my backstory. It is limiting and also not limiting, I guess, right?

Stellan Skarsgård: Well, I've done a couple of real people that have existed, like Wallenberg, the man who saved a lot of Jews in the Second World War, and a couple of painters. The thing is, in a film, you can't show even an ounce of who they are. What you do is that you have to give your impression. It's a very, very subjective impression of it. Then it works. You throw out the real things. If you do it like, he lived there, and then he moved there, and then he moved there, and then this becomes sort of a school play.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes. Tony, what's the benefit of not giving your actors 10 pages of backstory?

Tony Gilroy: If an actor comes, and look, we're doing something in the show where we're jumping a year ahead every three episodes, and there's an incredible amount of blank space. There are places where if actors want to know what's happened, then you help them out, and you fill that in if it's going to help them do something. I think the most important thing about what you're talking about is-- You asked the question in a really cool way, if you just gave me the backstory, would I know how to play you? What is increasingly fascinating to me as a-- What am I? I'm an architect of human behavior, right? It's a behavior job-- is everyone has chaos within them. Everyone is confusing. There's chaos within us all. It may be overwhelming. It may be hidden in the background. It may be someone's friend. The loss of that chaos is the death of life on film. I think. I think the characters really need to be able to surprise you constantly. They want to feel inevitable, but they want to be surprising.

I'll go with an actor as far as they want to go, whatever they need. You want me to tie your shoes, I'll tie your shoes, but my natural default is to just let you do your work and [crosstalk]

Stellan Skarsgård: You never tied my shoes.

Tiffany Hanssen: I know, I was going to say--

Tony Gilroy: I never tied your shoes, Stellan.

Stellan Skarsgård: We'll have that.

Tony Gilroy: You know what? We still have time. There's time.

Tiffany Hanssen: There's time. There's always time. Okay, gents, I'm going to interrupt here with our listeners who have been chiming in here. We got a text that says, "Love Andor, high production value stories are out of this world. Good. Even the evil empire is layered and humanized. So interesting. Love Stellan Skarsgård. I just have to share that we named our son Stellan because it looked good in the credits of Chernobyl. Definitely my favorite Skarsgård." I think it says something that people have a favorite Skarsgård, first of all.

Tony Gilroy: Really? There's a lot to choose from.

Tiffany Hanssen: There are a lot to choose from, as Stellan has mentioned. We'll always say that the Skarsgård in the room is my favorite. "Thanks, Tony Gilroy, for giving us one of the best-written series ever. Andor is smart, suspenseful, timely, inspiring. Stellan is an amazing actor. He gives Luthen real gravitas and exposes the high stakes of the story. Those speeches are epic." Let's get back to that speech, maybe, and hear a little bit of it.

Luthen Rael (played by Stellan Skarsgård): I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my sacrifice? I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything.

Tiffany Hanssen: Stellan, sacrificing everything doesn't necessarily mean there is no hope, though.

Stellan Skarsgård: No. Of course there's hope. They all hope. They would stop immediately if they didn't hope. Revolution is full of hope.

Tiffany Hanssen: Tony, I'm wondering, you mentioned, or maybe it was you, Stellan, that said you could drop this anywhere in 6,000 years of history. Who said that? One of you said that.

Stellan Skarsgård: Tony Gilroy said it, and I repeated.

Tony Gilroy: I've been saying it.

Tiffany Hanssen: Tony Gilroy said that you repeated it.

Tony Gilroy: He just stole my talking point.

Stellan Skarsgård: I stole it.

Tiffany Hanssen: I've already forgotten who said it. All right, I'll take credit for it then.

Tony Gilroy: Do it.

Tiffany Hanssen: I'll do it. If that's the case, why does it feel so timely to me?

Tony Gilroy: I think we narcissistically always think that we live in some brand new moment and everything is fresh. I think the really sorry truth is that it's a sort of rinse and repeat cycle. Look, the show was written. The digestive system of making a show this big, the inception is a long time before the delivery. A lot of this is written and built a long time ago. The strikes held us up. We were supposed to come out last year. There's no way that you could play Pin the Tail on the Calendar and try to time your show to have it be of the moment.

You're trying to always do something that's timeless and classic that people can come back and watch again and again and again. Really, a big thing for me is to try to make stuff that's not disposable, that has a shelf life. When you're doing that, one of the unanticipated things that came along is that I really feel that there is something timeless about this. I can pull comps all the way through history of things I'm using in the show to build it. There's all kinds of different things I'm using from stuff I've read about. They're all over the last couple thousand years. It's a complicated answer, but I just think that we underestimate how ordinary our situation is, I think.

Tiffany Hanssen: You mentioned you study human nature, so maybe speculate why it is that we look for ourselves in what we watch. I identify. I pick out little pieces of people and characters and moments in a show, and I think, "Oh, yes, I get that. I get that, "or, "I could do that." I look at Stellan's character, and I think, "I could get up there and say that. I could be as inspiring as that." Give me a drink, I could go do it. What is it about us, do we have to do that?

Tony Gilroy: It's such a fundamental question. The power of narrative and the origin of it, again, I'm going very basic here, but what evolutionary need do we have for narrative? It must be something very, very powerful. We all feel the same way. I think we're trying to make understanding, obviously. Why do we have religion? We're trying to figure out what's going to happen to us when we die. We're trying to figure out what we're doing here. I suppose narrative, once you've got food and water and warmth, you're trying to figure out the next thing. You're trying to figure out, "What am I supposed to do with these things?" It's such a fundamental question. I'm sure there are people that have studied the--

Tiffany Hanssen: Somebody's written a dissertation on this. Somebody has.

Tony Gilroy: I'm sure there's many of them. I've made a living off of it. Stellan and I have fed our families off of it.

Stellan Skarsgård: Yes.

Tony Gilroy: It's a little late to find out why at this point, but thank God that that exists. Thank God people need stories.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes. Stellan, let's get back to your character. Luthen, he's running a business, he's wooing clients, he's attending events, he's sort of a shapeshifter. I'm just curious how it was to play a singular character who is modulating himself through these different roles, and if that opened up something interesting for you.

Stellan Skarsgård: Well, I come from a theater. I've done four different characters in a Shakespeare play. You change character faster than you change your wardrobe. There's nothing new in that for me. I don't have to spend three weeks to get into character each time, because that would be horrible.

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes, that would be.

Stellan Skarsgård: I was, of course, fascinated by it in a very superficial way. I liked this guy. Unfortunately, I have such a bald head, so I had to have two wigs. Even the one that wasn't a wig, I had to have a wig. That was very funny.

Tiffany Hanssen: Don't we all kind of do that? The person that you're seeing in front of you right now is not the person that's going to be sitting on my couch tonight.

Stellan Skarsgård: [laughs] I know that. I'm not going to be sitting on your couch either.

Tiffany Hanssen: I hope not. You'll be disappointed, believe me. We all sort of do that, right? Maybe this is a question for you, Tony. How do you maintain the essence of that character as they move through? You'll see Tiffany when she's on the couch and when she's in front of the microphone. You'll see Luthen when he has all [crosstalk]

Tony Gilroy: For him, it's life and death. His character has two very, very specific, different identities. There's the revolutionary underground organizer. He's spent 15 years sub rosa funding all kinds of various groups and building up relationships and scouting talent all around the galaxy. All under the cover, he runs a gallery, an antiquities gallery basically in Coruscant, in Rome, in New York. A very high-end antiques gallery. He has a totally different identity there. If you figure out who I am sitting on the couch tonight, it doesn't cost me very much, but for him, it's life and death.

One of the things that really happens in this Season 2 is that the difficulty of having revolution go loud and large when your business is secrecy is very, very difficult. Stellan does an amazing job this season of watching a character who you really felt really had their act together in Season 1 and really was on top of everything. Watching him over the next four years as the revolution comes together and as his position becomes more difficult to maintain, you watch him really begin to degrade under just the inevitable pressure of that.

Tiffany Hanssen: Tony, I'm going to get a little meta on you. Well, as if I haven't already, but talk about good versus evil in this series more writ large in terms of how we process good versus evil. It's not here in the series, and it's not in life, a stark contrast. There are shades, and people are complicated. I'm wondering if that makes it more interesting for you as a writer.

Tony Gilroy: I don't have any other way of doing it. I have to inhabit every single one of them. I have to believe in every one of them when you're with them. They all have a point of view. Our show really is, I think, saying as much as anything that there are large movements, particularly. Think about the empire, which seems in most cases just a really evil, monolithic bunch of people in white suits killing people and taking things over. Within that, in the end, it's people worrying about their office, it's worrying about their territory, it's worrying about their boss, it's worrying about all their various insecurities.

Now, the things that have led them there and their ability to continue to do things that are vile and horrible, that's a pain threshold. Everybody has to be interesting to me, and everybody has to have a point of view. In the end, I do believe in good and evil, but you can't write them that way. You can't build it like that.

Stellan Skarsgård: Well, I think it's dangerous to do it. Since the Hays code, we have in American affairs, we have a tradition of showing good guys and bad guys. The first time I came to the United States, they asked me, "Are you doing the good guy or the bad guy in the film?" I didn't know what to answer. It's like if we depict the Nazis, like, evil, evil, evil all the time, and we use them as an emblematic, as an image of evil, then we're really doing dangerous stuff. Because if we can't see ourselves in them, then we cannot see when we're becoming them.

Tiffany Hanssen: Well, there's a problem this country has right now is seeing the human in some people. I wonder if creating that nuance on the screen is as difficult as it is to do in life.

Tony Gilroy: It's an empathy challenge, isn't it?

Tiffany Hanssen: Yes.

Tony Gilroy: I think there's ways of looking at the show and graphing that. The loss of empathy and the loss of being able to sympathize is the path to cruelty, isn't it?

Tiffany Hanssen: Stellan, you were gonna say something?

Stellan Skarsgård: No, he took the words--

Tiffany Hanssen: Again. He stole--

Stellan Skarsgård: Again. He said them so brilliantly.

Tiffany Hanssen: Tony, Season 2 is the end of this. The end. The end. The end. The end. The end. The end.

Tony Gilroy: If the show is good, that's the reason it's good, I think more than anything else is that we really knew where we were going all the way through. We always had a target. You always say in a really great script, every scene is about the whole movie. We have that ability. When you know what the end is, you can really drive towards it. It also gives you the safety and comfort of knowing that-

Stellan Skarsgård: You can go home.

Tony Gilroy: -how much more can you pour into it when you're finished it?

Tiffany Hanssen: "You can go home."

Tony Gilroy: Yes, you can go home, there's a couch waiting for you.

Tiffany Hanssen: On that note, we'll let you go home. The final season of Andor, Season 2, is airing next Tuesday, May 13th. Tony and Stellan, thank you.

Stellan Skarsgård: Thank you.

Tony Gilroy: Thank you very much.