{"id":489010,"date":"2026-02-21T02:51:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T02:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/489010\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T02:51:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T02:51:07","slug":"disney-didnt-want-tony-gilroy-to-say-fascism-while-promoting-andor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/489010\/","title":{"rendered":"Disney Didn’t Want Tony Gilroy to Say ‘Fascism’ While Promoting ‘Andor’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since day one, shot one, moment one, Star Wars has been about fascism<\/a>. It\u2019s not some hidden message. A group of Rebels fights an evil Empire that has taken over the galaxy, using masked Stormtroopers and by committing genocide<\/a>. It\u2019s right there in the text. Over the past few years, that story was given even greater depth<\/a> in the Disney+ show Andor<\/a> as creator Tony Gilroy and his team explored not just the dawn of that Empire but the birth of the Rebellion. And yet, even though the show has, was, and will always clearly be about fascism, that was not a word Disney wanted anyone to use while promoting the show.<\/p>\n

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter<\/a> for a fascinating, timely interview, Gilroy explained that while he was asked not to use the word \u201cfascism\u201d specifically, it didn\u2019t stop his ability to talk about the intentions of the show.<\/p>\n

\u201cDiego [Luna] and I had some early, super long-lead press, and we tiptoed out,\u201d Gilroy said. \u201cWe were like, \u2018Oh my God, this is really electric.\u2019 So we stepped back, and we had a bunch of people that we were going to put on the road to sell the show. The actors have a broad spectrum of political ideas, and we didn\u2019t want anybody to perjure themselves or violate their conscience. So we came up with a legit historical model, and it\u2019s a version of what I\u2019m telling you now. \u2018We studied history to make the show, and we based it on historical models. We don\u2019t have a crystal ball. There\u2019s comps for everything that we did all through history.\u2019 So that was a very, very safe and legitimate place for us to sell the show without ever having to say what I\u2019m free to say now.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Gilroy is \u201cfree to say now: is that Andor, like most of Star Wars, was obviously about fascism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe simplest answer to the strange synchronicity of [what\u2019s happening in the U.S. right now] is really on them, the outside forces,\u201d Gilroy said. \u201cWe were pretty much doing a story about authoritarianism and fascism, and the Empire is very clearly a great example of that. It\u2019s a great place to deal with those issues, and as we\u2019ve discussed many times before, we had this wide open canvas to deal with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible,\u201d he continued. \u201cHow were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don\u2019t think it\u2019s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the beginning, it was very confusing. People were like, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re psychic,\u2019 or, \u2018The show is prescient.\u2019 But in the rear-view mirror, it\u2019s really a much sadder explanation than that,\u201d he concluded. That \u201csadder explanation,\u201d of course, is that history is just repeating itself, as it does time and again.<\/p>\n

Head over to the Hollywood Reporter<\/a> for much, much more from Gilroy as his time in the world of Andor comes to an end.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since day one, shot one, moment one, Star Wars has been about fascism. It\u2019s not some hidden message.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489011,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[43265,49,48,361,75,21883,43268],"class_list":["post-489010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-andor","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-star-wars","tag-tony-gilroy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}