ANDOR Creator Tony Gilroy Explains Why the Ghorman Massacre Had to Hit Hard
When Andor set its sights on the Ghorman Massacre in Season 2, the goal wasn’t to check off a box in Star Wars lore. It was about making viewers sit in the fear, chaos, and brutality that fueled rebellion.
In a recent scene breakdown for Variety, series creator Tony Gilroy explained that the Ghorman storyline wasn’t treated as just another chapter in the rebellion, it was the centerpiece.
“We knew we were going to be investing very heavily in Ghorman to build a world, a planet, a city like that, at that scale, you have to really use it. We knew that it would be a centerpiece of the show. It’s a centerpiece in canon.
“In the five years that I get to curate, it’s a critical moment in the history of the rebellion. And yet it’s very un-described. There was a mandate and a demand to do it, but there was no information about what it was, which is kind of the best thing for us.”
The creative freedom allowed Gilroy and his team to imagine Ghorman as a fully realized society, with its own culture and infrastructure. The massacre unfolds in Palmo Square, a bustling, prosperous plaza built from the ground up by production designer Luke Hull. Everything here was made to serve the story. Gilroy said:
“It’s not even just the architecture and the construction. It’s designing a place for the story and for what the directors are going to be able to make... Luke Hull gives us this absolutely astonishing little stadium to play in. He fits it into the aesthetic of what we’ve already built... this is a year-long project.”
The episode doesn’t rely on spectacle. It’s built for immersion. The camera doesn’t flinch from the violence, there’s no cutaway from the consequences, and it gives you someone to follow through the madness with Cassian.
“We knew that the massacre would be taking place in a town square. We also knew that we didn’t want to do anything that looked or felt like anything that we had done before. We also wanted a prosperous planet. We wanted a place that was well off, politically connected, not an easy place for the Empire to take down.”
For Diego Luna, that grounded brutality is part of what sets Andor apart from other Star Wars stories. The action has weight. The characters bleed sndf die, snd even something as intimate as a fistfight carries months of preparation. Luna explained:
“Just the fight with Syril was two days and a half. We worked on that fight for, I would say, months. There was many different choreographies we did before. We all agreed on one [version of the scene] that Tony was really happy about and that explained the whole story, that the fight has to tell.”
And when it all comes together, Andor doesn’t feel like a space opera. It feels like history, or, more accurately, like history repeating itself.
“The beauty of Andor is that you can get so deep that you might forget you’re in this galaxy far, far away. You are just in a place that actually exists.”
“That’s the strength of that episode, that it’s a massacre that feels like personal, it’s happening. You’re looking at it, and you go like, ‘Shit, those are people suffering. Those are people being hurt’ You know, that destruction is actually happening.”
Andor never wanted the Ghorman Massacre to be a reference, it wanted it to be a reckoning. One that doesn’t just build the Rebellion’s timeline, but earns it.