In the latest episode of Andor, we get to see a lot more of a legacy character dating back to the original trilogy – Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly). Showrunner Tony Gilroy explained that this iteration of the character has a lot in common with a real-life politician named Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi is the current speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and she’s forced to deal with a lot of stuff behind the scenes that people aren’t privy to. This forces her to be a bit more pragmatic than the average person, which is something Gilroy said Mothma has to deal with as well.
“Anyone who follows the canon — she’s sort of a Nancy Pelosi character, isn’t she? She’s kind of trying to do good or whatever she’s trying to do, and she’s losing — I mean, I don’t know. She a powerful presence in the Senate but she’s facing defeat after defeat after defeat as the Empire is taking over here.”
Gilroy said Mothma is always presented as a stiff and formal character who’s always “perfectly put together.” He wanted to dig a little deeper and answer the question “what’s really going on behind here?”
“It was very exciting to take a sort of still portrait of someone and throw it away and build a real life behind it. She has a much, much, much more complicated life [than] anybody was ever aware, and in many ways, of all the people that walk through this show and face all kinds of decisions and problems and pressures and the hiding and chasing and betrayal — she has to stand out almost in the open for the whole show, in a really dangerous position.”
This makes hers one of the more tense storylines in the show, he said, because she has to do “everything in the open.”
New episodes of Andor premiere Wednesdays on Disney Plus.