Andor on Disney Plus: New Star Wars TV series stars Diego Luna, Denise Gough and Kyle Soller

Before we unpack Andor, it’s important to understand where the highly anticipated new Star Wars TV series fits into that galaxy far, far away.

Ever since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 for the measly sum of US$4 billion ($3.85b), the Star Wars universe has expanded at a rate that makes Tatooine podracing look positively sedate.

But, just like in the Boonta Eve Classic podrace depicted in Episode I: The Phantom Menace, not all entrants can be winners.

In fact, a decent percentage of post-acquisition content has turned out just like Sebulba in that race — bantha poodoo.

The three new entries in the Skywalker Saga — Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi and Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker — produced mixed results at best.

In comparison, the pre-acquisition success of The Clone Wars, an animated TV series that debuted in 2008, paved the way for solid additions in that space, such as Rebels, The Bad Batch and Visions.

A foray into live-action TV, however, was entirely new territory, but Lucasfilm immediately hit paydirt for its parent company’s Disney Plus platform with the release of The Mandalorian in 2019.

Baby Yoda, or Grogu to his friends, broke the internet, essentially telling fans around the world, “Subscribe to Disney Plus, you will”, which could be the cutest Jedi mind trick in history.

The appeal of Pedro Pascal’s Mandalorian heavily leveraged the popularity of fan favourite Boba Fett, so it was somewhat ironic that the OG bounty hunter’s own spin-off series, The Book of Boba Fett, wasn’t nearly as well received when it was released last year.

This year’s eponymous Obi-Wan Kenobi series, though, fared considerably better, largely because it brought Ewan McGregor back into the fold as the iconic Jedi master.

Talking about iconic characters, Disney thought it could recast Han Solo with Alden Ehrenreich for a standalone movie, Solo, in 2018, but even director Ron Howard couldn’t lift it above mediocre status.

No matter how you slice it (with a lightsaber, obviously), the best thing out of the Star Wars universe since Disney took over is the 2016 standalone film, Rogue One.

Indeed, you could make a compelling case Rogue One is the best Star Wars film after the original George Lucas trilogy.

Directed by Gareth Edwards, the film exists to expound upon a single unexplored idea in Episode IV: A New Hope.

Remember Princess Leia sticking something into R2-D2 at the start of Episode IV, moments before Darth Vader boards her stylishly white spaceship and started Force-choking people?

Well, the item Leia was loading into R2’s memory banks was, as we later find out, the plans for the Empire’s Death Star battle station, which were instrumental in helping Luke Skywalker blow it up when he fired two torpedos down its exhaust vent.

Rogue One tells the story of how Leia obtained those plans, as well how the otherwise indestructible Death Star wound up with such a laughably vulnerable weak spot.

In addition to having incredible cinematography and an entirely new aesthetic for Star Wars, a big part of the film’s appeal was a hitherto unknown character, Cassian Andor, a Rebel spy, played by Mexican actor Diego Luna.

So, when looking at the totality of Star Wars IP and pondering the future, it certainly wasn’t Disney’s worst idea to think Rogue One could be a ripe source of material for a live-action spin-off TV series.

With Luna reprising his role in Andor, the show takes place roughly five years before the events of Rogue One (and thus five years before Episode IV), exploring the circumstances that led to Andor going from troubled thief to Rebel hero.

Maintaining a similar aesthetic as the movie, the series will consist of 12 episodes that span a year in time, with creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote Rogue One, already promising a second season of 12 episodes to follow.

For Luna, the series marked a return to Star Wars, but, for actors Denise Gough (Under the Banner of Heaven) and Kyle Soller (Poldark), it was unlike anything they’d experienced previously in their careers.

“You properly feel the history, like the almost 50-year history, when you’re on set and when you read the scripts,” Soller says on a video call with his co-star and The West Australian.

“Like my first day, I had to walk on and I had two Death Troopers (next to me), and I thought, ‘OK, even I, as somebody who has not been obsessed with all of this, can feel what the history of the whole thing and how much people love it,” Gough adds.

Andor sees Soller play Syril, an ambitious Imperial officer of modest rank, tasked with investigating a crime the titular character committed, while Gough plays high-ranking Imperial officer Dedra Meero.

As someone who was never a Star Wars tragic growing up, the Irishwoman was taken aback by the production’s obsessive attention to detail.

“So, I had a scene where I was working and I wanted to undo the top of my uniform; I just wanted to do it the way a man would wear a tie and, like, open the tie, because you’re working really hard,” Gough recalls.

“And everything had to stop while a phone call was made to check if I could, and I wasn’t allowed, and I was like, ‘Oh, of course’, because an Imperial officer has never opened the top button of their uniform (in any of the films).”

Soller, on the other hand, grew up with the Skywalkers, which makes him ideally suited to offer an opinion on Luna’s performance in such a pivotal role.

“Diego brings such an incredible amount of light and shade to a really complex complicated character, who’s an outsider trying to find out who he is and his place within the universe,” Soller says.

“He represents everything that is sort of on the periphery that gets to be in the centre and deserves to be in the centre,” Gough adds.

“I’d follow him if I wasn’t on the (side of the Empire), I would really love to be a Rebel with Diego.”

Andor starts on September 21 on Disney Plus.