Production designer Luke Hull and set decorator Rebecca Alleway brought the vast scope of Andor’s second season to life with 180 sets, half of which were built from scratch.
The production used a number of real locations in the U.K., Spain, and Italy: Valencia’s futuristic City of Arts and Sciences building was transformed into the Senate complex, while England’s Greenham Common became the Rebel hideout used by Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). Shots of Lake Como, Italy, were used to augment the planet of Ghorman and farmers’ huts on Mina-Rau were built in the village of Watlington, England. All of the sets took several months to create.
“Every set was a four-month lead time, so every day was we were trying to start new sets,” Alleway says. “It was a massive team effort of researchers, artists, drafts people, art directors, and more, all working in the set decoration department.”
“It was a labor of love, for sure,” Hull says.
Here, Hull and Alleway give Rolling Stone the inside story on the inspiration behind key sets from Andor Season Two.
Chandrilan Wedding
Season Two opens with the marriage of Mon Montha (Genevieve O’Reilly)’s daughter Leida into the Sculdun family. The opulent festivities on Chandrila gave the team an opportunity to create immersive, detailed sets at Pinewood and to use the real Montserrat mountain range in Spain. Hull imagined the lavish estate as an ancestral home with a deep history and tradition. The design was dictated by the ritualistic wedding, which used several spaces.
“The complex is based on circles because I wanted a very kind of classical Star Wars look, even though it was a mansion set in the mountains,” Hull says. “There are concentric circles in the courtyard garden to inform the ritual. One of the references for me was Thomas Vinterberg’s film Festen, which is around a wedding where things come to a boiling point and then in the morning there’s an awkward breakfast.”
Alleway says she had “a lot of fun” designing the food and flowers for the wedding scenes. She had previously designed and flowers for the Chandrilan Embassy in Season One, and wanted to expand on that aesthetic, which was Japanese-inspired. “We knew (the set) was going to be up for a really long time, so we used artificial flowers,” she says. “We made hundreds, all sculpted. It was a good thing they were artificial because (when) the actors strike happened that set stood and it all stayed as it was.”
Axis Safehouse
Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) hide out in a run-down—but surprisingly spacious—apartment on Coruscant, and later Cassian rescues Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau) from the same safehouse. Hull says that showrunnner Tony Gilroy wanted the safehouse to have its own backstory. “At first, it doesn’t seem too bad. It doesn’t have furniture, but there’s some warmth here. It’s safe. And then it becomes more and more decayed. Who knows who else has stayed here and hacked it apart and hidden things? There was space inside, but in a way I thought it felt more lonely than if we’d made it smaller.”
Hull took inspiration from Parisian public housing, picturing the series of apartment blocks on the outskirts of Coruscant in an industrial area. “For French social housing they build these huge towers, often with quite a strong sense of design, and yet they are extremely soulless and repetitive,” Hull says. “The idea was to make (the characters) minuscule within the environment, and even lost within it.”
Coruscant Bodega
When Cassian and Bix visit a shop called Samo’s on Coruscant to buy Ukio melons and a spicy Moski pepper, they are actually in London’s Barbican. But the location wasn’t available until close to the shooting date, so the team spent several months designing, creating, and assembling all of the goods and products inside the shop in the props room at Pinewood Studios in London.
“I was very lucky to have a buying team that had worked on a couple of Star Wars (productions) before so they understood the language and they started purchasing things,” Alleway says. “We designed and purchased shelves, and we started filling the shelves in the prop room and doing the graphics for them at least five months in advance. Everything had to be graphic-ed, hung, colored, organized, and rearranged.”
Samo’s housed hundreds of items, including fruit and packaged goods; It was a huge endeavor for a relatively short scene. “From a design perspective and set decorating perspective, it never got boring, so you wanted to make an effort on every on every level,” Alleway says. “I considered everything, from every small piece to every big design piece.”
Dedra’s Apartment
Dedra Meero (Denise Gough)’s sparse high-rise apartment on Coruscant was meant feel like the antithesis of Eedy Karn’s home, where Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) grew up. “I think the reason Andor has gone down so well is it’s Star Wars, but we get to see inside people’s homes,” Alleway says. “We get to open their drawers, we get to see what they eat. We get to understand the background of their characters and why they became part of the Rebellion or part of the Empire. That was like a dream because (we could create) these total fantasy worlds that everyone loves, but go deeper and explore this (design) language in a really domestic way.”
Hull again used a circular design, constructing the apartment with connecting rooms like four sections of a pie. It has a Soviet-era communist vibe. “She’s given this sort of disc and it’s not very homely,” Hull says. “She hasn’t made it home because that’s just not who she is. It’s very functional, and yet it’s also quite glamorous. It has that upper echelon look, and yet it’s so sterile. But the main thing was that there are no doors to close and there’s nowhere to hide.”
The apartment is showcased in a pivotal scene when Dedra and Syril invite Eedy (Kathryn Hunter) over for dinner. Originally, Hull designed a revolving restaurant for the meal, but it became too ambitious. “We were like, ‘Maybe this is a bit extreme,’” he says. “It became better, in a way, to scale it down and put it in Dedra’s world. I we’d had more scenes in Dedra’s home because there’s a whole section you don’t really get to see in the living room.”
For dinner, Dedra serves fondue, an idea Alleway presented to Gilroy and he eventually wrote into the script. The fondue set was based on a reference from an interior design magazine from the 1960s, presented on a circular dining table. The fondue itself was edible, but it wasn’t made of cheese. “It was vegetarian-based,” Alleway says. “And the weird shrimp were edible, although they weren’t actually shrimp. They were meant to be a Star Wars version of shrimp. I didn’t expect it to be quite as messy or as runny as it was.”
Ghorman
Palmo, the capital city of Ghorman, was the largest set built for Season Two. It was constructed on a backlot at Pinewood and needed to include the plaza and numerous streets, which were later destroyed during the uprising and massacre. The buildings reflected the planet’s history and tradition. The café, shops, and hotel in Palmo are the sorts of places you might find in Europe, particularly Italian cities like Milan and Turin. “We drew on Italy and France and old historic European and combined it with the language of Star Wars,” Alleway says. “Every set in Ghorman was quite challenging because how you make something like that Star Wars? Other sets are so obviously part of the universe, but this was a whole new world.”
The café combines that historic architecture, which evokes the 1920s and 1930s, with shapes and textures that feel more otherworldly. The Ghorman spider can be seen in the wall décor as a nod to the planet’s textile economy and to the marble mosaics found in places like Rome. The teapots were inspired by an Art Deco teapot Alleway found and its unusual shape informed the rest of the glassware and cutlery. “Everything was really carefully considered, down to every spoon,” she says. “Every morsel of food they ate in there was designed and baked by my food stylist into certain shapes.”
Initially, there wasn’t a café in the script, but Hull felt it was a good way to indicate the culture and history of the people. “It showed how the Ghormans would have been in their heyday with the intelligentsia going into this café,” Hull says. “Designers would be in there, tool makers would be in there. People would be discussing things, sketching things, spilling out at night, drinking coffee in the day, and having cocktails at night. When we jump it’s more repressed, but it was a way of showing it as a social hub.”
The textile shop that Cassian visits was created on location at London’s Guildhall. “I liked it because it also has that plaza out front, which gave more scope to Ghorman rather than just having one central plaza,” Hull says. “This is a 300-year-old business that has passed from generations, so you feel the history in the building. He sells specific tones of silk and design. I loved the color swatches we had made for those.”
Davo Sculdun’s Party
Davo Sculdun (Richard Dillane)’s lavish party was filmed in the Vestíbul Principal in Valencia, Spain, and dressed with consideration for how the Coruscant elite would eat and drink. Thinking about a character like Sculdun, who has a lot of money, Alleway imagined illuminated blocks of ice displaying sushi—but the Star Wars version of sushi. “I had five concept artists and one of them, for that scene, just (created) all of the sushi,” she says. “It was molded and painted and then shipped to Valencia. It based on some of the mad creatures that you’ve seen in in Star Wars before and I messed around with tentacles.”
When Mon arrives at the party, a paparazzi drone accosts her inside, snapping a quick succession of photos. That droid was built and placed on a rig that a crew member carried across the set. “It spun properly and the lights went off and the rig was erased in post-production,” Hull says. “It was completely practical.”
Imperial Hospital
Kleya infiltrates an Imperial hospital to spare Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) from being forced to talk. The sequence required careful planning by Hull and Gilroy, who worked in tandem to figure out how the action would unfold in the spaces. Hull took loose inspiration from the Lloyd’s of London building and created a U-shaped structure with floors stacked on top of each other. Due to budget constraints and logistics, only one floor was actually built. The team then redressed it several times to create the illusion that Kleya is moving from floor to floor. “We made each floor look completely different, but in reality it was the same set,” Alleway says.
It had to be very clear where Kleya goes after she leaves the locker room, which was a separate set build, and there was a lot of consideration as to where she would set off an explosion to draw attention away. “Tony is really keen on geography and I think it’s really important as well,” Hull says. “When you’re dealing with so much scope and so many characters and so many moving parts you don’t want the audience have to work too hard to understand where everything is.”
Originally, Hull designed an emergency room on one of the levels, but that was cut as the design evolved. The hospital’s technology also required a lot of thought. Alleway calls the approach “high-tech retro.” “If you think about the tech of Star Wars, generally, for the 1970s when it was created it was pretty high tech,” she says. “We’re moving forward. It has to be high tech enough that it sits within our Star Wars timeline without tipping into being sci-fi.”
Luthen’s hospital bed in the stark, sterile hospital was a favorite creation. “That whole scene was really powerful,” Alleway says. “The room looked amazing, and Luke and I had such fun designing it.”
Although most of the hospital was built on a soundstage, postmodernist building 125 London Wall can be seen as Kleya scopes out her approach. “Kleya walks out on the to the balcony for the first look at the hospital’s exterior and you see where the ships are parked,” Hull says. “I’ve always wanted to shoot that location because it was so intrinsically Star Wars.
Marketplace
In a late-season flashback, viewers learn how Luthen and Kleya met. The characters visit a marketplace in a small hillside town, which was created at Xàtiva Castle in Spain. The market stalls were individually designed and built. “I had a Spanish crew that helped dress it, but all of that was purchased and put together in the U.K.,” Alleway says. “I went to Valencia with a team and measured up everything first, and then it was designed and set up on the back lot. We designed each stall to come apart and pack down, and we tested everything. Concepts were done for every single market store.”
Yavin Rebel Base
Evolving what fans have previously seen of Yavin was a big challenge. The team used a stage and backlot at Longcross Studios to build the expansive set, which connected the hangar, the meeting room, and the airfield in a continuous space. “It wasn’t a case of reimagining Yavin,” Hull says. “It was about expanding it and about giving it a little bit more humanity beyond just the rebellion planning of the temple itself.”
Cassian’s home on Yavin, which Hull dubbed Chez Andor, was filled with realistic detail and texture, including nods to his upbringing on Kenari. It had a kitchen, a wood chopping block, and even a shower, but it’s still fairly rundamentary. “It’s got to look like these characters actually exist in this environment,” Hull says. “They live here. They’re bedded in. There were a few things that warm it up, but we were very careful not to go too far with it because the whole concept should be that they’re ready to fail at any point.”
“We made practical drawers so that Cassian could go to a drawer and pull something out,” Alleway adds. “Everything was absolutely everything there, whether it was a tool on his work bench or a Star Wars stirring object, (which might) not necessarily be a spoon. We filled the homes you would a normal home.”
Cassian and the other rebels are often drinking or eating as the scenes play out—something Hull felt was generally important on the series. “I’m always very wary that people should have something to do,” he says. “Even if they’re not eating or drinking in camera. Like the security man who has the CCTV cameras in the hospital had a (Thermos) and a half-eaten sandwich. Anything that gives someone a sense of humanity. We always wanted to give the impression that these were real people who really lived in this world.”