Tony Gilroy Talks About Andor’s Political Prescience: “It’s just tragically and sadly familiar”

Andor creator Tony Gilroy was banned from using the word “fascism” when promoting Andor, but the ban has been lifted.

Andor is easily the best Star Wars thing to come along in a good long while: a twisty, morally complex meditation on the rise of fascism and the fomenting of rebellion, following the radicalisation of Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor as he goes from self-serving thief to committed (and ultimately self-sacrificing) revolutionary. The two season Disney+ series made Star Wars not only exciting again, but relevant; it’s hard not to see immediate parallels between the events of Andor and everything going on in the US at the moment, particularly the ongoing ICE occupation of the Twin Cities in Minnesota.

Creator Tony Gilroy certainly isn’t blind to those parallels, but says that they arise from historical patterns – the kind of events you always get when authoritarian is on the rise. However, he’s only now able to talk about it directly. According to a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “Fascism is a word that Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from saying during the earlier promotional phases of Andor’s spring 2025 release.”

Still, he dismisses any suggestion of special insight into our current political moment, saying, “You get out your Fascism For Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism.

“it’s the same shit all the time,” Gilroy went on to say. “Get rid of truth, get rid of a free press, destroy communities, nationalize the businesses, find an arbitrary enemy that you can elevate and false flag them through propaganda. Flood the zone with as much gak and atrocity as you can so that nobody can pay attention to what just happened, and pray that you have an overwhelming majority of sheep that will follow you. It’s just tragically and sadly familiar. It’s on them; it’s not on us.”

The whole interview is worth a read. Check it out here.