Genevieve O’Reilly recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly where she shared some details about Mon Mothma’s role in Andor. “We really get to develop her as a character, and we get to learn about her not just as a senator, but as a woman,” O’Reilly said. “[We learn] what her life is like, what she has to wrestle with, what are the dangers to her life, what it costs to be her.”
O’Reilly also praised creator Tony Gilroy for giving Mon Mothma a story arc worthy of the series. “Tony’s writing is so intricate and so taut. It lives in this world of the spy genre, of a sociopolitical drama, and yet it’s set within a Star Wars world. So it feels universal and intimate all at once,” she said. O’Reilly went on to state that she paid attention to Caroline Blakiston’s performance in the original Star Wars films. “I was always interested in her,” she said of Blakiston’s original performance, “and each time I go to play her, I go back to that scene.” “You can see when Caroline does that in that scene, for me, there was always a pain at the heart of it … You could see that she was carrying a pain, and I was really curious about what that was,” O’Reilly added. “What has happened in this woman’s life? What has it cost to be her? What are the sacrifices that she has had to make along the way to be that leader of a rebellion?” Finally, O’Reilly revealed that we’ll get to see what Mon Mothma is like when she isn’t working as a senator. “We see her talking to senators, and then we meet her at home with her husband,” she said. “We see the public and the private. We see her literally and figuratively take off her cloak and reveal herself as a woman in a way we’ve never seen before.” It’s great to know that we’ll get to see a side of Mon Mothma we never saw before. Needless to say, we can’t wait for Andor’s premiere later this month. Andor is set for a three-episode premiere on Disney+ on September 21, 2022.
