Andor Creator Says the Quiet Part Out Loud About Disney Star Wars

Let’s be honest: Disney’s run with Star Wars since snapping up Lucasfilm has been all over the shop, especially once they started cranking out a new streaming series every few months. If you, like me, have found yourself wincing at the overload, you’re not alone. There have been some gems in the rubble, though. Andor, Tony Gilroy’s stab at a more grounded, adult Star Wars, genuinely feels like it comes from another galaxy compared to the usual mix of nostalgia-bait and muddled scripts we’ve seen elsewhere.

Most of the recent Disney+ Star Wars efforts—The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the Ahsoka series spring to mind—have a knack for looking backwards rather than doing anything new. In contrast, Andor genuinely builds something fresh. The rest, frankly, too often get bogged down in their own oversized toy chest.

Gilroy’s Approach: Stop Playing with the Same Old Toys

Here’s where it gets interesting—the showrunner himself, Tony Gilroy, recently sat down with Backstory Magazine and explained his approach to Star Wars, and massive franchises in general. What he said should probably be tattooed on the forehead of every exec at Lucasfilm right now.

'A lot of times when you’re working on IP storytelling, your impulse is to open the toy box and start playing with all the toys. You should try to resist that. What you should do is leave more toys in the toy box that were there when you got there. Resisting the impulse to be a child and instead think more like a storyteller who is adding to the world rather than taking from it.'

Essentially, Gilroy isn’t interested in rummaging through the box and dusting off the same action figures everyone else played with as kids. He argues that if you’re lucky enough to create something in an established universe, you should absolutely resist the temptation to just go wild with nostalgia. Leave something for the next person—maybe even add something that wasn’t there before.

Franchise Fatigue: Why Playing with Old Toys Isn’t Enough

The biggest irony is that Gilroy himself has delivered two of Disney’s only genuine Star Wars smash-hits in the last decade—Rogue One on the film front, and now Andor for TV. Meanwhile, the likes of Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau (the blokes behind the “Mandoverse”) seem downright thrilled to haul every character, vehicle, and helmet from the attic. Need a few examples?

• Boba Fett pops up in The Mandalorian and gets his own, slightly baffling, spinoff
• Bo-Katan Kryze, Ahsoka Tano, and even Luke Skywalker all wander in for a crowd-pleasing hello
• The sequels themselves (starting with The Force Awakens in 2015) all but remade the original trilogy, plot beats and all

That endless recycling is a problem. Gilroy never points fingers, but it’s obvious he sees all this as a bit juvenile. If you’ve noticed yourself checking out when another familiar face shuffles onto screen, you’re not imagining things. The franchise, especially since Disney’s takeover, leans hard on the stuff that sold toys in the 80s, instead of building out the universe in any meaningful way.

Star Wars Grown Up (For Once)

Gilroy’s genius, and why Andor feels like a minor miracle, is that he’s not afraid to dig into the politics behind the stormtroopers and space battles. The original trilogy worked because it had real-world resonance—even the prequels tried to do something clever with galactic power games (messy though it was). Disney, though, has largely side-stepped all that in favour of Easter eggs and nostalgia triggers, which might be fun but wears thin.

Somehow, against all odds, Andor tapped into that original sense of stakes: big fights about freedom, empire, and sacrifice, rather than whether your favourite background Jedi gets a cameo. Gilroy charted his own path instead of painting by numbers.

In a way, his “close the toy box” philosophy is a perfect diagnosis of why Disney’s Star Wars often feels stuck in neutral. Nostalgia isn’t a terrible thing in itself, but if you never move past it, all the lightsabers and cameos in the world won’t stop things feeling stale.