Here’s why Diego Luna feels ‘Andor’ is so relevant today
“Andor” star Diego Luna tells USA TODAY’s Brian Truitt why he feels this series is so relevant today.
Spoiler alert! The following story includes light spoilers from the first three episodes of “Andor” Season 2.
If you thought Darth Vader choking out an underling or throwing his boss down an elevator shaft was incredibly tense, wait till you see an Imperial officer meet her boyfriend’s mom.
There have been far more Jedi battles and starship dogfights than actual romances in “Star Wars” movies and TV shows, outside of Han and Leia’s bickering flirtation and Anakin and Padme’s doomed love affair. Yet the new season of “Andor” (first three episodes now streaming; three more each Tuesday) for the first time shows members of the evil Empire in a domestic relationship, even though neither of them are exactly good at it.
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Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), a steely go-getter in the Imperial Security Bureau, and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), a repressed and meek civil servant, met in the first season, released in 2022. She’s hot to stop pockets of rebellion bubbling up against the Empire, and he wants revenge on Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) for getting away with murder. Syril saves Dedra’s life during the riots on Ferrix in the Season 1 finale.
Gough says she was worried about the aftermath: “I was like, ‘Oh no, I do all this work to make her this kind of odd, really specific type of character. And now she’s gonna get rescued by a boy? And then what, she’s going to fall in love?!’ ”
But the actress has been happy about how things are working now for the fan-favorite antagonistic power couple. Syril’s moving up in the Imperial Bureau of Standards and living in a swank apartment on Coruscant with Dedra, though she’s been traveling a lot for work. She’s part of a brain trust put in place by Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) to plan for potential resistance against an Imperial operation to mine a precious mineral needed for the construction of the Death Star.
“The great thing about putting them in this arrangement with each other is they retain all their Dedra- and Syril-ness,” Gough adds. “It’s a very awkward, strange interaction at all times.”
The most intriguing peek into their domesticity comes in the third episode, in which they’ve scheduled a get-together with Syril’s passive-aggressive, domineering mother Eedy (Kathryn Hunter). Syril makes dinner in their apartment, the stern Dedra tries on outfits and smiles, and both are nervous when Eedy shows up.
“You look nothing like what I expected,” she tells Dedra, who gives Syril an “Are you kidding me?” look. Over intergalactic fondue, they converse. Eedy, who’s always giving her son a hard time for not visiting, calls him “delicate.” And Dedra gives Eedy (and the audience) her entire backstory in a few sentences: her parents were arrested when she was 3 and she was raised in an Imperial kinder-block.
“You’ll toughen him up,” Eedy cracks, leading Syril to leave the room, but then Dedra icily lays into her. “This game ends now,” she says. “You want Syril in your life, you will think before you speak. I’ll make sure he visits twice a month, I’ll make sure that he calls you. I will guarantee a level of engagement, but it will be inversely proportional to the volume of anxiety you generate in our lives.”
“They say you marry one version of your parents,” Soller says of the scene. “In that moment, Eedy is seeing Deedra step up in a way that Eedy had to when Eedy’s husband left and (she) had to raise Cyril on her own. You’re seeing this very strong woman stand up and take the reins. (Eedy’s) going, ‘Oh, I’m seeing myself in you,’ which is quite narcissistic.”
Gough believes that if these two were together in a room again, “it’d be quite pleasant, in a strange way. Nobody gets destroyed – except that cutaway to Syril lying on the bed, which is just one of the most genius things. He just is like, ‘I can’t do it anymore. I need to reboot.’ ”
So do Dedra and Syril really care for each other? Even though each has their own agenda, “there is a deeper level of care and intimacy that they’re both exploring for the first time ever in their lives,” Soller says. “That intimacy is starting to break apart the foundations of the world that has been created for them and around them, and you see Dedra showing little cracks here and there throughout her journey, which is a direct result of their relationship.”
Unfortunately, neither has any example of real love to look at in their lives, Gough says. “Everything has been about control. So how then do two people come together and express real intimacy if you don’t learn it from somewhere?”
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