When the heist on Ghorman went wrong on Andor season two, it only took one bad call for tragedy to strike. In the case of rebel leader Cinta Kaz (Varadu Sethu), her life was snuffed out in an instant when a misfire took her down. In a story about the early days of Star Wars Rebels uniting against the Empire, anyone was fair game, and it’s something that show creator Tony Gilroy and writer Beau Willimon affirmed in conversation with Vulture, when discussing Cinta’s death as one of the franchise’s prominent queer characters.
Gilroy explained that Cinta’s fate was decided on early in the process of scripting Andor season two. “I pretty much came up with an actuarial table pretty early in the sketching process of season two. There were a couple of actors who did not want to come back and people who were complicated to get back and whatever,” he said.
“I remember calling Varada and saying, ‘Hey, I think that we’re going to do it this way.’ And I think I would really like to have friendly fire. I would like to have the stupidity of accident in the show. I would like to have something really stupid happen. This whole Ghorman thing is such a stupid cock up anyway. And I’m sorry, but you’re, you know, you’re the roulette. I don’t have another piece. I either kill you or Vel and [I] can’t kill Faye [Marsay, who played Vel]. And so it’s your turn. And I’m not sure if she had Doctor Who at that point or she was in the running, I’m not sure. [But] she wasn’t so depressed about it.”
When it came to some of the criticisms drawn from the choice to toe the line of falling into the “bury your gays” trope, Gilroy gave an even-keeled response. “This fascinates me because you get all this credit and the first season, ‘oh my God, you have a natural relationship ’cause, and we were like, ‘well, yeah, it’s just a relationship.’ We’re not making a big deal out of it. So then if you don’t make a big deal out of it and just treat it like it’s a normal thing and kill whoever you wanna kill, then that’s a problem all of a sudden.”
The choice was aimed at making it feel as real as possible for members of the rebellion, who no matter where they come from all choose to put their lives in the line of fire. “I would discount the first side if I could get a little bit more on the second. I mean, what more natural way to treat it than to treat it like a real thing? I’m not gonna like start to socially engineer my characters for some chat room.”
Willimon interjected, “Honestly, our mentality was that almost everyone’s gonna die. And that’s broadcast everywhere in the show, almost every episode, someone’s saying like, well, we’re never gonna make it, we’re never gonna see it.” Every Andor character is aware that they’re gambling their mortality for a bigger cause—especially in a series that culminates in the events of Rogue One, where most of the key characters die. “There needed to be something, something had to go wrong on Ghorman with that heist. We’re always thinking about cost.”
The importance of Cinta and Vel’s relationship was not lost on them. Willimon continued, “I mean, there is the fact that people did connect emotionally to that relationship. And there’s a part of you that goes [its] just pure storyteller catnip.” he reiterated the questions asked in the writing process about losses that would impact the audience the most, “I mean, we hurt you later with Luthen and Clea, we hurt you with Bix and Cassian–every way that you can feel the pain and the cost of sacrifice, that’s what this show is about. And, you know, there were multiple versions of what that heist would be, but the friendly fire thing was quite early on.”
The grim reality of Andor is that these are the people in the first wave that pave the way for the rebels we know in the original Star Wars trilogy. Their lives are given more meaning and multitudes, which is what made the show so great through the relationships it built. Willimon understood the emotional one-two punch impact of Cinta’s loss shortly after her tender reconciliation with Vel, stating , “One: you’re upset after that beautiful scene that this relationship is not gonna see its way through. Two, you go, ‘Damn it, friendly fire? That’s the way this badass goes?’”
He added more context how even the best laid plans can go awry thanks to ineptitude. “What does Vel say to the guy who pulled the trigger at the end? ‘She was a miracle. You will spend the rest of your life trying to pay for this moment, to earn your keep.’ And what you realize is that it is a supremely noble death. If you’re not willing to die by friendly fire or get accidentally run over, or [die] in a hail of gunfire in a big battle—they’re all equal because really the choice you made from the very beginning is that I’m willing to sacrifice myself, whatever form that takes. And that’s the magic trick, which is this shit is gonna happen and you don’t know which way you’re gonna go. You just know you are gonna go. And that noble decision was made from day one.”
Gilroy added, “But the problem with it is that everybody’s going to identify with different people in the show. Everybody in this audience is gonna have their person that they climb in with and maybe it’s multiple people, but there’s gonna be a lot of people who climb. So if you’re queer, you’re gonna climb in to this character.”
Gilroy pointed out, “The biggest thing that that does [it] for me is not just the friendly fire or the surprise of it or the tragedy of it, what I really need to do is I’m really driving very much to tell the story of Luthen as a very poor human resources manager. And his failure to recognize the importance of personal relationships and his need to try to break them up is a much larger thing, and a much larger and more important issue to me than whether you think … where is the place where Cinta should die or what, I don’t know. So I can’t—that’s a level of responsibility that comes from abundance, I suppose.”
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