Stellan Skarsgård and Elizabeth Dulau have spoken to Amy Richau at StarWars.com about the motivations and mindset of their characters in the second/final season of Andor.
Beware of spoilers ahead!
Throughout both of Andor’s seasons, Luthen was shown to be a cunning, and at times ruthless, rebel insurgent, willing to risk his life and the lives of others for the larger goal of taking down the Empire. But Skarsgård was never shocked by his character’s behavior.
“No, no, not at all,” says Skarsgård. “I have to play the character as [someone who] believes in the revolution.” But Skarsgård also appreciates the moments in the series where his character shows moments of empathy, such as when Luthen visits Bix in the Coruscant safehouse. “Even if you play a hard guy like Luthen,” notes Skarsgård, “he doesn’t have to be hard all the time. And if he doesn’t have empathy, then he has got nothing to do in the revolution, because the reason for revolution is empathy.”
Luthen’s death in the series wasn’t a surprise to the actor. “I don’t think anybody in that situation thinks they’ll make it,” notes Skarsgård. And flashbacks, which show Luthen as an Imperial soldier rescuing a young Kleya whose homeworld is being ravaged, reveal how he would likely have never made it this far without her as his partner.
The character of Kleya plays a much larger part in Andor’s second season, in part due to Elizabeth Dulau’s stellar performance in Season 1. Elizabeth looked forward to finding out more about her character along with the audience. “You have no idea who she is in Season 1,” notes Dulau. “She’s so shrouded in mystery. And I think mysterious characters are always compelling. It was enormously satisfying to revisit her and to get the answers to who she is.”
Dulau describes Kleya as a character who will fight against the Empire until the day she dies. And the flashback sequences helped flesh out her character’s motivations. “Her rebellion is revenge,” she says. She thought about the family Kleya lost and how that plays a role in her traumatic past. “That’s what fuels her. That’s what gives her the fire to keep going and become this formidable opponent to the Empire.”
It was important to show the complicated and conflicted feelings Kleya had for Luthen as she grew up. “It was key for me in developing their relationship that it is not a father-daughter relationship,” says Dulau. “It’s not that tender, heartwarming thing.”
The opposite side of that coin was the devotion to each other the pair developed over the years. “He spends every day after [they meet] effectively protecting her,” Dulau says. “And she protects him and that becomes their life. They are so reliant on each other.”
Kleya spent much of Season 1 of Andor in the background, which fit the image the actress had for her perfectly. “She’s cultivated that persona because she wants people to underestimate her,” she says. “Her power lies in being completely underestimated and overlooked. I think that’s something that we all do. We all sort of code switch and become different versions of ourselves in different situations.”
The episode “What a Festive Evening” sees the tense dance Kleya forces upon ISB officer and rebel spy Lonni during a party hosted by Chandrilan banker Davo Sculdun, in which she struggles to remove a recording device under the nose of ISB Director Orson Krennic. Kleya works with many tools this season, from a brooch that acts as a lockpicking device to key cards she hands off to operatives. But the hardest one for Dulau to master was also the most important: Kleya’s hidden radio. To capture the comfort and ease Kleya needed while operating the radio she uses to communicate with operatives and spy on Imperials, Dulau equated the action with driving a car where so much of the physical movements of pressing your foot on the gas pedal or turning the steering wheel become instinctive over time.
“That radio is like Kleya’s child,” says Dulau. “She has built that piece by piece over several years. She knows it inside out, back to front and sideways. And [director Ariel Kleiman] wanted to give some of that impression. He wanted Kleya’s hands to dance over this radio like she could do it with her eyes shut.”
Read the interview in full at StarWars.com and stream Andor on Disney+ now.
The post Andor’s Stellan Skarsgård and Elizabeth Dulau Break Down Luthen and Kleya appeared first on Jedi News.
