Star Wars Celebration delivered the first official glimpse into the world of Disney+'s upcoming Andor series starring Diego Luna, which is a spinoff of the standalone Star Wars film Rogue One, which premiered in 2016. The film starred Luna as the roguish rebel Cassian Andor who crosses paths with Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the daughter of the Empire's Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), who was responsible for building the Death Star and aiding in its eventual sabotage. The duo team up with an unlikely group, including Chirrut Îmwe (Donnie Yen), Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), and Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed), to help get the Death Star's plans into Princess Leia's hands and meet a tragic fate at the end of the film.
In addition to Luna, the series features Genevieve O'Reilly as Mon Mothma and Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera — as Stellan Skarsgård confirmed in a Swedish interview earlier this year — as well as Adria Arjona, Kyle Soller, Denise Gough, and Robert Emms. Tony Gilroy, the series' showrunner, is also writing for the series with his brother Dan Gilroy and Beau Willimon.
Andor is set years before Cassian Andor finds himself immersed in the rebel uprising, as he is faced with the beginnings of the Empire's oppressive and violent rule. In the trailer that was shared this week, fans were shown just how dangerous and volatile this era of Star Wars is, and we couldn't help but draw comparisons between the time in which Rogue One was released with the timing of Andor's release later this year.
COLLIDER: Rogue One is my favorite movie. It's changed my life. It really made me want to get involved in politics and get off my butt and actually do something. So I was curious to know for you coming back to Cassian in a world that has not gotten any better than it was in 2016, what has it been like to find this rebellious spirit for him?
LUNA: Well, for me, it's important because I believe that storytelling, and more precisely science fiction, is it's a beautiful thing — a beautiful tool to remind ourselves what we are capable of and what should be worrying us and I believe this is the world of Rogue One and the story of Cassian. [It's] a story about real people finding out they're capable of, of doing something of changing their reality. The story we are going to tell in these 12 episodes, it's about that awakening.
I believe there is no better time to come out with a story like this than today. The world we live in needs us. It needs us to get involved, to feel capable of actually doing stuff. This is the story of someone that probably, at the beginning, [who] didn't know he was capable or had not acknowledged that he was capable of [anything]. That's why I think it's important to tell it now and to do it right.
Andor premieres on August 31 on Disney+.