No offense to Ben Mendelsohn, who by all accounts is a nice guy and a tremendous actor, but he’s just got one of those faces that always has him cast as a villain. In fact, that exact baggage was used to inform his performance in Captain Marvel, before it turned out that his Talos was one of the good guys all along.
Various set photos making the rounds from Disney Plus Star Wars series Andor have shown a number of background characters sporting the same sort of uniform as Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic, who we met as the Director of Advanced Weapons Research for the Galactic Empire. That led to talk that the Emmy winner could be reprising his role, with the show set five years before the events of Rogue One, and a new rumor offers that he will indeed be back to pose more problem’s for Diego Luna’s Cassian.
There’s no verification or corroboration to the claim as of yet, but Forest Whitaker was recently confirmed to have boarded the ensemble as Saw Gerrera, so Andor already has previous experience with drafting in powerhouse character actors from the Anthology spinoff. No details are provided as to how he’ll potentially factor into the plot, either, but there’s a canonical backstory that could easily be implemented.
Before ascending to the rank he holds in Rogue One, in other Star Wars media it’s established that Krennic is fond of using torture and interrogation techniques as a means to accomplish his own ends, which sounds perfectly suited for the sneering Mendelsohn to make a guest appearance in Andor, which will track our intrepid title hero during the nascent stages of the Rebellion.