Andor is ‘the most grounded Star Wars you can get,’ says Diego Luna

polygon.com:

For a franchise that lives and dies by its white-knight heroes, Cassian Andor is an odd fit for a solo project. While Rey, Luke, Han, and Obi-Wan struggle with their capacity to do harm, Cassian mentions in his first (and only) film having done terrible things in service of the Rebel Alliance. In the scene we initially meet him during Rogue One, he shoots his informant who can’t make the escape with him. He is relentless and, often, dour. That is exactly why Diego Luna says he wanted to return to the character.

“I don’t think he wants to be a hero,” Luna tells Polygon. “Definitely when we meet him he doesn’t think he’s capable of doing anything important. He’s surviving, he’s a mess. He’s in a very cynical moment where he’s not thinking further than his nose.”

When Andor picks up with Cassian, it is five years before he meets Jyn Erso in Rogue One. Things are almost bleaker for him than they were in the prequel film, which ends with his death (among many others). In the series, we find him on Ferrix, in the Star Wars equivalent of a blue-collar town on the periphery of the universe as we know it. There are no Jedi around, the Empire is at the apex of its power, and the personal stakes for Cassian have little to do with the battle for the fate of the galaxy. As Luna puts it: “This is the moment when he’s the furthest he can be from the guy we meet [in Rogue One].”

But Andor shares Rogue One’s sensibility for keeping a keen, ground-leveleye on how the huge stakes and battles of the Star Wars universe come together. With Tony Gilroy once again helming Cassian’s story (he wrote both Rogue One and Andor and is an executive producer on the series), there’s a real focus on how the big swells of the galaxy feel at a local