Disney Didn’t Want Tony Gilroy to Say ‘Fascism’ While Promoting ‘Andor’

Since day one, shot one, moment one, Star Wars has been about fascism. It’s 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. It’s right there in the text. Over the past few years, that story was given even greater depth in the Disney+ show Andor 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.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter for a fascinating, timely interview, Gilroy explained that while he was asked not to use the word “fascism” specifically, it didn’t stop his ability to talk about the intentions of the show.

“Diego [Luna] and I had some early, super long-lead press, and we tiptoed out,” Gilroy said. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, this is really electric.’ 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’t want anybody to perjure themselves or violate their conscience. So we came up with a legit historical model, and it’s a version of what I’m telling you now. ‘We studied history to make the show, and we based it on historical models. We don’t have a crystal ball. There’s comps for everything that we did all through history.’ So that was a very, very safe and legitimate place for us to sell the show without ever having to say what I’m free to say now.”

What Gilroy is “free to say now: is that Andor, like most of Star Wars, was obviously about fascism.

“The simplest answer to the strange synchronicity of [what’s happening in the U.S. right now] is really on them, the outside forces,” Gilroy said. “We were pretty much doing a story about authoritarianism and fascism, and the Empire is very clearly a great example of that. It’s a great place to deal with those issues, and as we’ve discussed many times before, we had this wide open canvas to deal with it.”

“So 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,” he continued. “How 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’t think it’s 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.”

In the beginning, it was very confusing. People were like, ‘Oh, you’re psychic,’ or, ‘The show is prescient.’ But in the rear-view mirror, it’s really a much sadder explanation than that,” he concluded. That “sadder explanation,” of course, is that history is just repeating itself, as it does time and again.

Head over to the Hollywood Reporter for much, much more from Gilroy as his time in the world of Andor comes to an end.

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