In ‘Andor,’ minor ‘Star Wars’ villains play major roles

In the galaxy of “Andor,” “Star Wars” super villains are relegated to the shadows. The Disney+ series is more interested in what might be called supervisor villains: the bureaucrats, planners, schemers and petty functionaries who make tyranny possible. Instead of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, we get Dedra Meero and Syril Karn, a pair of ambitious middle-managers who become an unlikely couple in their pursuit of Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor. “It’s so nuanced, these villains are operating in a real grey zone, and they’re representing a side of the empire that we have never seen before,” said Kyle Soller, who plays Karn. “You’re getting a real like cogs and nuts and bolts view of how the empire machine works, from the very bottom to the upper echelons.”

In a joint interview with Soller for The Associated Press, Denise Gough, who plays Meero, added, “It can’t just be brute force. An empire can’t survive on brute force, it takes all these Machiavellian, tiny movements here, tiny movements there, ripple effects everywhere.” Gough is a 45-year-old Irish actor who is also currently starring in the thriller “The Stolen Girl” on Hulu. Soller is a 41-year-old Connecticut-born actor who has long lived in London with his wife, actor Phoebe Fox.

Their characters came together during Season 1 as each sought to collar the mysterious figure of Andor amid the burgeoning Rebel Alliance — Karn from the police side, Meero from the police-state side. In Season 2, Meero and Karn each become caught up in the exploitation of the powder-keg planet of Ghorman, a previously peaceful place where the Galactic Empire needs to gouge-mine a mineral essential to building the Death Star. The process is likely to kill or displace its residents, among whom a rebellion brews.

A group of imperial bureaucrats meet secretly in a conference room to plan the planet’s destruction, in scenes that see the return of actor Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic, the Death Star builder who was the chief antagonist of 2016’s “Rogue One.” (“Andor” is a prequel.) He’s a senior leader but is still a functionary subject to the mercy and whims of the dictators he serves.

“Andor” creator Tony Gilroy said the meeting was his chance to make his version of the oft-dramatized Nazi Germany Wannsee Conference, what he calls a “PowerPoint meeting” of middle managers over lunch in 1942 to drily and practically plan the extermination of European Jews. Krennic singles out Meero during a lunch break, seeing a strong thinker in counterintelligence. She smartly suggests encouraging the Ghorman rebellion to become violent.

“Propaganda will only get you so far,” Meera says, in one of the season’s key lines. “You need Ghorman rebels you can depend on to do the wrong thing.” The plotline pushes Karn and Meera, neither of them ideologues, out to moral cusps where it seems they may switch sides. “You get to see how the empire is using its underlings,” Soller said. “No matter how high up they achieve power, they’re all being used, they’re all pawns, and disposable.”

Gough said the difference between the two sides is that of “a gang and a tribe.” “The empire is the gang and the rebellion is the tribe,” she said. “The tribe has heart and loyalty and all of those things, and values all of those things, and the gang makes it seem like they do, but they don’t, they disperse at the first sign of trouble, and they dispense when it’s no longer needed.”

Meero and Karn’s overlapping ambitions also lead them into a romantic coupling. That had Gough worried at the end of Season 1 that they would end up in an “insipid” world of common couple tropes, but she said “I couldn’t have imagined how weird it would get.”

“They’ve never had an example of love,” Gough said. “They grew up in a controlled, cultlike environment. So actually the story we’re telling is how do two people, when they grow up like that, how do they function in relationships?”

Associated Press