Andor star Stellan Skarsgård recently appeared on the Q with Tom Power show to discuss the series’ revolution game master’s deliberate ambiguity behind the curtain. Luthen Rael, if that’s his real name, doesn’t personally use pew-pews or the Force to advance the resistance against the Empire himself and that’s always made the organizer’s motivations hard to pin down.
“The people don’t know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, which I really like, because none of us are really good guys or bad guys. I mean, it’s like real people. He does really terrible things, but so does any general—he sacrifices people for a cause, and so does every military,” he said. Luthen essentially tells Andor his identity doesn’t matter when he won’t see the sunrise of their revolution; what matters is that the Rebels get there no matter the cost, which as audience members we get to see over the course of the events in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy.
Skarsgård continued, “But is it the right course? You don’t know. And you don’t know [often] until much later if it was the right course. So this ambiguity, the gray zones, I’m very interested in.”
It’s something that really inspired him to act from a young age, “I wanted to do a hero, of course. I mean, [Star Wars] has the ingredients. The seven-year-old boy’s dream of being an action hero, but it also has something.”
He traced it back to watching the same sort of swashbuckling Old Hollywood adventures that George Lucas grew up on too. “When I was about 10 years old, I saw The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard. And he’s a kind of double character as well, like this one I always dreamed about doing and then I got to.” That truly explains a lot about the actor’s take on Luthen when he plays the rich dandy dealer of antiquities versus the militaristic and harsh general behind the scenes.
Now when it came to joining the Star Wars universe, it wasn’t necessarily a sort of goal to add to his gauntlet of Disney, Marvel, and now Lucasfilm, roles but of course he was aware of its place in the zeitgeist. “I’ve seen all of them because I’ve had kids—all the time. Whether I want to see them or not, I’ve seen them. But there are really good ones, there are really bad ones. And in the first ones… [in a way] George Lucas and the originals were doing it as a comment on [the] everyday politics of the world and then got lost in lightsabers.” He sees Andor as engaging again with real-world politics, the same way Lucas explored societal structures and power dynamics with his films.
He continued to describe empathy as the driving core of what makes Star Wars’ revolutionary ideals timeless and raises the stakes of the action. “In this show, there’s a society and you feel the society, you feel the oppressive society. You have different worlds and you have different cultures and you feel them. And you see that, ‘oh, they think differently than we do.’ And it’s a much more personal and colorful life. And it, of course, becomes political. And we have to see the functions of… I mean, it’s been going on for thousands of years that we have had revolutions and counterrevolutions and stuff. But it’s good to be reminded about it now and then.”
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