20 Years Later, Star Wars Is Finally Giving This Underrated Character & Actor The Spotlight They’ve Always Deserved (But At What Cost?)

Andor creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy has confirmed that an underrated Star Wars character and actor will be given a major spotlight in the upcoming second season, 20 years after they first debuted in Revenge of the Sith. However, that spotlight is going to be a brutal one. After all, Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma is right on the precipice of one of the most dangerous and significant events in her entire life at this point in the Star Wars timeline.

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tony Gilroy teased an absolutely “hellacious” journey for Mon Mothma in Andor season 2 with the belief that no one else walks down a harder road than the senator-turned-leader of the entire Rebel Alliance:

Canonically, there’s the moment where she leaves the Senate, and that’s in our timeline. So we’re definitely dealing with that, but I would say, of all the characters in the show, of all the hellacious things that people go through, and all of the difficulties and hardships, I don’t think anybody has a harder road than she does. Because she has to do everything that everybody else does with all the tension, fear, and anxiety and she has to do it in public.

She has nowhere to hide, and this season just ramps that up to an almost unbearable point. What Genevieve is going to do in this second season — we realized in the first season what a brilliant actress she was and that we hadn’t found the limits of what she could do. We still haven’t found them. But he opportunity to write for her and write her story large was very important to me in the second season.

Having first played Mon Mothma 20 years ago in deleted scenes of Revenge of the Sith, Genevieve O’Reilly has made appearances as the Rebel Alliance leader in 2016’s Rogue One, voicing Mothma in the animated series Star Wars: Rebels, appearing in 2023’s Ahsoka as Chancellor of the New Republic, and of course, in Andor season 1 as a member of the Imperial Senatre secretly aiding Rebel cells. However, Mothma’s biggest and most challenging story yet is about to be told in Andor season 2.

What Mon Mothma’s Difficult Journey Means For Star Wars

From Senator To Leader of The Rebel Alliance

Considering Gilroy’s comments about the hard road ahead for Mothma, her transition from the public eye of the Empire to leading the Rebellion outright looks to be a big part of Andor season 2. The Ghorman massacre will notably be taking place in the show, a brutal event where Imperials killed multitudes of protesters, and Mothma publicly blames the Emperor for the atrocity. This forces Mothma to flee Coruscant and get extracted by Rebel cells. As seen in Rebels, she’d later broadcast a speech to the galaxy that saw the Alliance truly forming for the first time over Dantooine.

It looks as though Andor will finally show Mothma’s journey away from Empire on-screen for the first time (with Cassian likely being part of the initial extraction team). Likewise, it will be fascinating to see Mothma grapple with public decisions she won’t be able to reverse, as well as what the consequences might be not only for her, but also for her husband and daughter. Defying the Imperial regime is no small thing, so for Gilroy to call Mothma’s journey one of Andor season 2’s hardest roads has me both excited and fearful about the cost she’ll have to endure.

Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma Is Absolutely Perfect

One of Andor’s Most Captivating Characters

Andor season 1 easily proved how great of an actress Genevieve O’Reilly is as Mon Mothma who’s finally getting the spotlight she deserves on-screen and in live-action. It’s exciting to see that Mothma’s story is only going to get bigger, as well as Gilroy’s high praise for O’Reilly. Although the journeys of Cassian, Luthen, and Saw Gerrera are exciting and compelling, Gilroy is absolutely right that Mothma’s journey is one of the most captivating and challenging, given how public her first acts of Rebellion were forced to become (and how close she was to the core of the Empire itself).

Andor season 2 premieres April 22nd on Disney+.

TV Show

My Favorite TV Shows
My Watchlist

Andor

10/10

Release Date

September 21, 2022

Network

Disney+

Showrunner

Tony Gilroy

Directors

Susanna White

Writers

Dan Gilroy