As Andor’s first season arrived on Disney+ in the fall of 2022, the production team was already hard at work on the second. Production designer Luke Hull understood from the beginning that Season 2 would be another set-intensive undertaking, and his team made sure to schedule even more preparation time than they’d used before. “It’s born out of story and character and on what’s on the page,” he explains about their approach to Andor’s grounded sense of design and construction. “It’s about finding a tone that feels right for the story that we want to tell. [Creator and executive producer Tony Gilroy’s] approach has always been like each three episodes is a movie. You’re trying to hit that cinematic look that is intrinsic to Star Wars.”
“We covered a lot of ground in Season 1,” notes Tony Gilroy. “We did Ferrix and Aldhani, and we did Narkina 5, and we did some Coruscant. And it felt pretty expansive, but we’re gonna go bigger.”
“With all the success of Season 1, there’s just obviously been an appetite to sort of dial it up for Season 2,” adds Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) visual effects supervisor Mohen Leo. “So much of the original team from Season 1 has come back…. Season 2 is definitely more ambitious in terms of showing more…unique locations [and] going to more places.”
Andor Season 2 sports a diverse array of locations involving practical set design, prop creation, and extensive visual effects. Some places we’ve visited before but now pack new surprises; another, known only by name, has been depicted for the first time; still more are entirely new. Let’s dive into some of the locations and worlds seen in this week’s first three episodes, all directed by Ariel Kleiman and written by Tony Gilroy, including Yavin 4, Chandrila, and Mina-Rau.
Does that jungle look familiar?
Having stolen a TIE Avenger prototype from a Sienar Fleet Systems test facility, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) manages to (barely) fly the ship to a rendezvous point in a dense jungle. His partner, however, is missing, and ironically Cassian is taken captive by a squabbling group of Rebels, a cell that doesn’t know Andor and find themselves stranded on this unknown world. It’s only after the group is attacked by a Yavinian doodar that Cassian is able to escape aboard his ship, and in the wide shot of the Avenger flying away, we see a familiar group of Massassi temples. This is Yavin 4. The structures first appeared in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) and were last seen as recently as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), but how the Rebel Alliance managed to establish a secret base there remains a mystery.
“The origin of Yavin is up for grabs,” says Gilroy in reference to the larger canon of Star Wars storytelling. “You spend two episodes there and you don’t realize until [Cassian] escapes that the jungle that he’s been in…is undeveloped Yavin. It’s raw Yavin.”
Unusual for a TIE Fighter, Hull’s art department built a full-scale, practical ship for use while filming on set. “The ship itself had to do a lot, so it seemed obvious from the start we should build a full interior [and] exterior ship,” the production designer explains. The construction “comes apart in three pieces and gets transported around and goes to the Yavin clearing.” Leo adds that “it’s one of those things you normally don’t see as a full, real set. You could actually walk inside and sit in the cockpit.”
They planted a field, and then moved it.
A new planet for Star Wars viewers, Mina-Rau has become the home (and hiding place) for Cassian, Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), Brasso (Joplin Sibtain), Wilmon Paak (Muhannad Bhaier), and of course, the droid B2EMO. “I wanted to get some sunshine in the show and some bright sunlight,” Gilroy says of the world’s creative spark, which also served to answer a basic question about resources in the galaxy. “Where does all the food come from for Coruscant? They’ve been cast out of a community that they really care about, and they found a new place to be, and it’s sunny and it’s wonderful, and it’s going to be taken away from them.”
Like Ferrix, it’s a world with a tight communal bond built on a local economy that requires hard labor. As Luke Hull notes, “the whole planet’s been terraformed to grow one type of crop to feed the Empire…. [Whether] the people are on the run or [were] born there, they all live in these kind of communes [and] get a certain area of land to farm and manage…but the grain goes off world.”
Hull was responsible for selecting the type of crop that would be grown on Mina-Rau, eventually settling on a variety of ancient rye grain that could be sowed in England. “Somehow we found a farmer and convinced them to grow that instead of wheat that year across their field,” the production designer explains. “Rich Hill, location manager, found a very good field, actually, not too far from the studios. It gave us great…horizon lines because obviously it had to look vast. We had to extend all this in post as well.”
The production crew built the complete set of the mobile home and assorted equipment in the rye field, located near the small village of Watlington in Oxfordshire. Before the main unit shoot took place, however, the SAG-AFTRA strike began in the summer of 2023. That didn’t stop the field from continuing to grow. The production greens department had to improvise, cutting sections of grain out of the field and preserving them within a soundstage at Pinewood Studios. The various set-pieces were then moved, as the scenes weren’t completed until the last week of shooting in early 2024.
Star Wars at home….
An important aspect of Andor’s storytelling are its elements of everyday domestic life. We’ve seen hints of this in past stories, such as the meal scenes in A New Hope or Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), but Andor integrates these mundane yet authentic qualities on a more elaborate scale. We’ve seen Coruscant many times before, but in this series we go into housing blocks, stores, and office spaces. Episode 2 depicts another one of these locales: Dedra Meero’s (Denise Gough) palatial yet stark high-rise apartment, which she now shares with none other than Syril Karn (Kyle Soller).
“Tony’s writing is so different from anything that’s been done in Star Wars before,” explains set decorator Rebecca Alleway. “To have the chance to take it further, and to develop characters, to develop their worlds, their houses where they lived…. I remember being so excited designing my first Star Wars kitchen…. It was such a great challenge. [We] always go back to what Star Wars is, looking at all the original references, and then drawing on character…. It meant that we just had to be really creative and find new ways of enabling us to make these sets look cluttered and real and characterful, but not in the usual way.”
Property master Ben Wilkinson adds that home economists Katharine Tidy and Olivia Somary had their hands full creating various foods required for the season, including the “fondue, but with this kind of weird, jelly-like bug” that Syril’s mother, Eedy Karn (Kathryn Hunter), eats when she makes her awkward visit to the apartment.
A traditional highland wedding.
Because it was produced during the global pandemic, Andor’s first season did not include elaborate location shoots in countries outside of the United Kingdom. That changed with Season 2. Chandrila has existed for many decades in the Star Wars canon as Mon Mothma’s (Genevieve O’Reilly) homeworld, but it had never been visually depicted in a cinematic story. “You really just go on a journey to imagine where Mon Mothma and the Chandrilans come from,” comments executive producer Sanne Wohlenberg. “You always look for something new and fresh in the world of Star Wars.”
The Mothma estate is located in a mountainous region. With its distinct, pinnacled formations, the Montserrat range to the northwest of Barcelona, Spain, was ultimately chosen as the real-world shooting location. The ceremonial walk that takes place before the wedding of Leida Mothma (Bronte Carmichael) and Stekan Sculdun (Finley Glasgow) was shot on location there while the various estate interiors were created back at Pinewood. “It’s just like a perfect Star Wars landscape,” comments Hull. “It’s soft rocks that don’t seem real or are not very common across the world.”
For the estate’s design, Hull and the art department researched an unusual blend of historic Japanese stone castles and minimalist, nature-infused architecture from Scandinavia. The ballroom where the memorable wedding dance takes place included a stone floor that featured a unique, celestial map. “I always felt that the best thing with the Chandrilans was that they were proud about their place in the universe,” notes Hull. “So, the idea was that the floor is like a star map of their position within the galaxy, which we did a slightly smaller version of in Coruscant [at the Chandrilan embassy]. The dance became the main focus, I think, for Tony and everyone. That ballroom becomes more like an arena really for a lot of people’s interactions.”
To decorate the wedding, Alleway took her lead from work she’d done previously for the Chandrilan embassy in Season 1. “Ikebana is the art of Japanese flower making,” she explains. “So I knew that if Mon was doing flowers for her daughter’s wedding, it would be like the Ikebana flowers in the embassy. So, I immersed myself in that.”
As Wohlenberg summarizes, the opportunity to create aspects of Chandrilan culture and tradition can mean lots of interesting surprises and insights into the emotions of the characters. “How you clink your glasses when your speech is happening, how you applaud, how [they do] all those things, and how they dance is what makes it slightly extraterrestrial,” she says. “I think the big surprise that Tony kind of incredibly and so beautifully [imagined for] Mon Mothma’s journey [is that the] very elegant and civilized Chandrilans actually let their hair down when it comes to a wedding. It was a world up for grabs and I think we took it.”
