ANDOR Season 2 Will Unravel Luthen’s Past and the Future of His Rebellion
With Andor Season 2 on the horizon, one of the biggest lingering questions is the true nature of Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen Rael.
He was introduced as a puppet master pulling the strings of the rebellion, and quickly became a fan-favorite, thanks to his ruthlessness and poetic speeches.
But how did he get here? And what happens next as the Empire tightens its grip? According to showrunner Tony Gilroy, Season 2 will finally pull back the curtain on Luthen’s past and the impossible burden he carries.
In a live Q&A on the official Star Wars YouTube channel, Gilroy explained how the character took shape in his writing process.
“This is the same as with any character. I think the easiest thing to say is imagine you just have a pencil and a piece of paper and you’re gonna start to draw somebody. I needed an organizer. I needed a recruiter. I needed somebody who was at the center of something. I needed a new mysterious character.
“What would he be like? What’s a cool job for that? What’s the kind of job that gives you access to all kinds of things and also plugs you on Coruscant? Oh God, what if it’s a gallery? What if it’s an antique gallery and then once you know that just leads to all kinds of other things. Well, he needs a sidekick doesn’t he?”
In Season 1, Luthen had a monologue in which he talked about how his sacrifice for the cause is his humanity and use the tools of his enemy, saying “I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sun rise that I will never see.”
Gilroy went on to say that even he didn’t fully know Luthen’s backstory until Season 2 came together. “There’s a lot of things about Luthen that I did not know until we started writing season two. So those things we’ll learn about Luthen, [like] who he was before in season two.”
He then likened Luthen’s struggle to that of a tech entrepreneur taking his company public. “You’re gonna see a guy who built a startup company in his garage and in Aldhani, he goes public.
“It’s gonna be the stress of how do you take your little revolution and all the work you’ve done for 15 years—how do you go public with that and how do you go large? That’s really the stress [he’ll be under] so we’re gonna watch him under a great deal of stress.”
That stress is sure to push Luthen further than ever before. We know he’s not around by the time of Rogue One, but the big question remains. Does he fall in the fight, or does he vanish even deeper into the rebellion’s shadows? Andor Season 2 is set to give us the answers, and also raise even more questions along the way.