{"id":489104,"date":"2026-02-21T03:51:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T03:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/489104\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T03:51:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T03:51:07","slug":"andors-tony-gilroy-is-free-to-say-the-fascism-part-out-loud-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/489104\/","title":{"rendered":"Andor’s Tony Gilroy is free to say the “fascism” part out loud now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andor\u00a0creator Tony Gilroy did a fairly extensive press tour when the show\u2019s second and final season rolled out last year, in which a great many people\u2014including your humble Newswire writer<\/a>\u2014asked him about the Star Wars\u00a0show\u2019s very obvious parallels to real-world events. Invariably, in these interviews, Gilroy would give an obviously true, but also obviously diplomatic, answer: That nothing he was writing about in his ground-level examination of the Galactic Empire as a fascist and authoritarian regime was new, and that the fact that the series kept rhyming with a rising tide of right-wing governments in countries around the world was a sad symptom of human nature, not a direct commentary on any given situations. Gilroy never specifically said that his employers at Disney had asked him not to use words like \u201cfascism\u201d or \u201cgenocide\u201d in these conversations\u2026 until now, per a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>, where Gilroy acknowledges that request, and calls that old approach \u201ca 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

To be clear, the showrunner isn\u2019t claiming to have been horrifically stifled by The Mouse Corporation, noting that he worked up the press strategy after he and Diego Luna did the very first interviews for the show\u2019s new season, and realized that they were about to get hammered with questions about the show\u2019s parallels to, say, the Trump regime. \u201cWe stepped back,\u201d Gilroy says, \u201cAnd 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\u201d (And, again, as someone who had one of these conversations with Gilroy while also reviewing the series: It\u2019s not like he wasn\u2019t allowing the work to scream the answers he was politely sidestepping in interviews; he might not have been saying \u201cgenocide,\u201d but Genevieve O\u2019Reilly\u2019s Mon Mothma certainly was<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Gilroy still holds to that line to some degree, noting, for instance, of the show\u2019s depiction of Ghorman\u2014a planet that contains a mineral the Empire wants so it can build its giant superlasers\u2014that, \u201cGhorman is Greenland. Ghorman is anything. \u2018We want the rare earth, we want this.\u2019 It really is just a crude laundry list of moves that they have, and my earlier answer stands for the way it rhymes with the show.\u201d Gilroy, who\u2019s currently working on his new composer-minded movie Behemoth!, does sound happy to cut a little more loose in interviews now, though, calling the current situation in America \u201can absolute gothic nightmare.\u201d As for Trump vs. The Empire: \u201cYou get out your\u00a0Fascism 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. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Andor\u00a0creator Tony Gilroy did a fairly extensive press tour when the show\u2019s second and final season rolled out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":["post-489104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489104","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=489104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}