Diego Luna and a stressful ‘Star Wars’ series

The first season of the Emmy-nominated Disney+ series “Andor” featured Diego Luna reprising his role as Rebel spy Cassian Andor from the 2016 “Star Wars” movie “Rogue One” and showing how he hooked up with the galactic good guys. A prequel to a prequel (since that film was a backstory to the original 1977 “Star Wars”), “Andor” Season 2 (first three episodes streaming April 22 at 9 ET/6 PT, then three more each Tuesday) sets up the events of “Rogue One” while also upping the action and the anxiety − for its characters and the audience.

As the Empire rules the galaxy with an iron hand (and builds a secret weapon of mass destruction), pockets of resistance are growing, and everybody’s stressed out. That psychological aspect is “the beauty of the season,” Luna says, and explores “how difficult a revolution is. There’s all these factions, and yes, there’s a moment where everyone can aim to the same target, but then you are there, left together, and all those differences become an issue.”

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In Season 1, Cassian was part of a massive prison break and an insurrection against Imperial forces in his home of Ferrix. Twelve new episodes ratchet up the stakes, as he steals a TIE Fighter, goes undercover on the planet Ghorman − where the Empire’s up to no good and there’s a scrappy group of resistance fighters − and is recruited for a high-profile rescue mission.

But all the various personalities around him are tested as well. His girlfriend, Bix (Adria Arjona), has PTSD after being tortured by the Empire. Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) risks her personal and political life for the nascent Rebel Alliance, while the more hardcore guys in the resistance, including Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard) and extremist Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), are a bit more morally dubious in their actions. Even Imperial folks are feeling palpable unease, including ambitious couple Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller).

Showing this sort of universal galactic anxiety was important to “Andor” creator Tony Gilroy. “That’s how I fed my family for 30-plus years. I’m in the behavior empathy business,” says the Oscar-nominated director of “Michael Clayton” and writer on “Dolores Claiborne,” “The Devil’s Advocate” and four “Bourne” movies. “The better my ability to inhabit every character, the better the storytelling will be. That’s the game.

“In this show, everybody’s confronted with epic decisions of great importance all the time, organically. It’s just my job to make them as real as I possibly can.”

‘Andor’: Diego Luna sparks a rebellion in ‘Star Wars’ series

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and other Rebels scramble to revolt against the Empire in the second season of Disney+’s “Star Wars” series “Andor.”

Gilroy doesn’t tell stories about “good and bad” people, Luna adds. “There’s just people surviving a galaxy that’s turning darker and darker on them. It’s why this show is so relevant today, and it’ll be relevant in years, because it’s about the complexity of community work.”

Gough compares “Andor” to “Angels in America,” which she starred in on Broadway in 2018.  “You have essentially six leading characters across eight hours of the most intense journeys for each of them,” the Irish actress says. “They never cross each other enough to help each other out of whatever. They are all on their own mission. And when I was watching (‘Andor’), I was like, ‘God, you’re sort of alone together.’ ”

The appearance of Ben Mendelsohn’s villainous Orson Krennic, the primary antagonist of “Rogue One,” was one example of a “Star Wars” personality where showing vulnerability and “realness” might demystify him in a way.

“All roads lead to the Death Star, and I had to get him in there to start the fuse on that,” Gilroy says. “Some characters really benefit from learning their DNA and their provenance, and it might diminish his. I’m not sure I want to watch him make coffee in the morning.”

Luna calls “Andor” a “beautiful excuse” to explore the political and social climate of a revolutionary period. Besides a commitment to actual emotions, there’s also an emphasis on bringing more relatability and less fantasy to the “Star Wars” landscape, from mass media to wedding receptions. “If it doesn’t remind you of something you have experienced before, probably it’s not right.”

Gilroy also dipped into our own history, especially when depicting the Imperial massacre at Ghorman − mentioned in various “Star Wars” projects and explored in depth in “Andor” − that ignited the rebellion. A scene from the Season 2 premiere featuring Krennic and the Imperial brain trust was modeled after the Wannsee Conference, a 1942 meeting of Nazi officials pivotal to carrying out the Holocaust.

“One of the things they really needed was propaganda and media,” Gilroy says. “Power has always used narrative as a way of shaping the battlefield, whether it’s the burning of the Reichstag or the Gulf of Tonkin (incident) that gets America into Vietnam or the sinking of the Lusitania. The use of truth and story has been in the playbook of oppression since people were sitting around a campfire. Instead of carrier pigeons, now it’s something else, but that’s a very potent tool.”