13 Behind The Scenes Details We Learned About The Production Of 'Andor'

One thing audiences often expect these days is a post-credits scene at the end of a movie or television episode. It's nothing new, but thanks to the MCU, it's often expected. Sadly, there are no post-credit scenes in Andor until the very end, and it's a big one. Throughout the prison sequences, it's unclear what they are making, and while the Internet had many theories, only one was proven right in the end.

The post-credit scene reveals that the parts they built were needed to construct the Death Star. It also showed how it was constructed with the help of droids, so the scene was a pretty big deal for the franchise. It was also a closely held secret by the production. Disney+'s Star Wars series don't often have a post-credit scene, but it isn't unprecedented. It's good this one was kept secret, as the viewers' desire to know the truth only fueled speculation and interest in the show.

One of the most obvious aspects of Andor that separates it from other modern Star Wars series and films is its extensive use of practical effects. Whenever possible, the production team opted to use real locations or film on soundstages to achieve the realistic look and feel of the series.

This extends to props and characters, which is unusual for a Star Wars series. One of the things that truly sets it apart from its peers is the absence of The Volume, the giant, curved immersive soundstage that covers nearly 360 degrees of seamless LED as a virtual background. It has updated background technology to the modern age and is fantastic, but absent in Andor's production.

This was a deliberate choice for the production, as Andor was always intended to be more grounded in reality than other Star Wars projects. Tony Gilroy, the series writer, told Empire that he was keeping it “old-school” and confirmed they didn't use StageCraft either. StageCraft is the technology behind The Volume.

Like every Star Wars project, a brilliant composer was brought on board to score Andor. Nicholas Britell has worked on several notable films, but it wasn't until he scored Succession in 2018 that he dipped his toes into television. When he was brought on to score Andor, he was given a lot of freedom to write the music the way he wanted, which he explained in an interview with StarWars.com:

I was always such a huge fan of [Andor showrunner] Tony [Gilroy]'s, for years as a writer and also as a director. Michael Clayton is one of my wife’s and my favorite movies. So I think the idea, from very early on, even before I joined, was that they were going to actually give me a lot of freedom to create a unique musical landscape. They really felt it was important to have, given the tone and, especially given how the show starts, there's a gritty, darker vibe to things. Tony and I talked about that. Tony felt very strongly that he really wanted it to have its own musical language, hopefully.

When Andor was in its development stage, Tony Gilroy was brought on board to help flesh it all out. The series underwent numerous changes before settling on a 12-episode first season followed by a second and possibly a third season. Andor is canonically set five years before the events of Rogue One, so initially, the plan was to knock out five seasons of 12 episodes each.

This would have set the stage for each season to cover one year of Andor's life, but Gilroy felt it was unsustainable, telling ComicBook.com, “Originally we thought 'oh, maybe we'll do five seasons,' but it's just the scale of the show.” Because of the reliance on practical effects and on-location filming, it just wasn't possible to follow the five-season plan.

Gilroy joked about the series' number of seasons during a separate interview with Variety:

You just couldn’t possibly physically make five years of the show. I mean, Diego would be, like, 65. I’d be in a nursing home. We were panicked. We can’t sign on to this forever.

Andor ditched The Volume to film the vast majority of its scenes practically, and while much of this was accomplished on a backlot, some areas had to be used outside the studio. Some of these locations were in pretty remote areas, and not all of them were entirely safe.

In an interview with Empire, Diego Luna described a shoot in Pitlochry, Scotland, saying, “we had to walk for hours up a mountain to set up one shot. Huge Effort. Really dangerous to get there. All you can see around you is sky, trees, rivers, lakes. Amazing! Like being on another planet.”

While it is a television series with 12 episodes in its first season, Andor has a remarkably high number of named characters. There are over 200 in total, which is far more than you typically see in any television series or film. In comparison, A New Hope only had around 35 named characters.

On top of the named characters, the production used over 6,000 crowd extras throughout the series' 12 episodes. Needless to say, that's a lot – especially in an age when crowds can be made up of digitally-rendered people. In The Phantom Menace, the crowds were made up of painted Q-tips, so Andor certainly outdid the films regarding casting the masses.