This story incorporates spoilers for “Andor” Season 2, Episode 9.
Senator Mon Mothma is lastly, overtly, a part of the riot.
Within the ninth episode of “Andor” Season 2, the senator from Chandrila, performed by Genevieve O’Reilly, publicly denounces the Empire in a speech from her pod within the Imperial Senate.
“The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil,” says Mothma as she challenges the official narrative spun to cowl up the “unprovoked genocide” on Ghorman. “When truth leaves us … when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to … whatever monsters scream the loudest.”
She then declares Emperor Palpatine is a monster and turns into the Empire’s most outstanding public enemy.
In established “Star Wars” lore, this can be a second that can straight result in the formal declaration of the Insurgent Alliance. It’s additionally one, in response to O’Reilly, that Mothma has at all times been prepared for.
“That’s the fulcrum of who the woman is,” says O’Reilly whereas seated in a Beverly Hills lodge bar final month. With branches of flowers hanging from the ceiling, the room’s decor is nearly harking back to that of the Chandrilan marriage ceremony seen in earlier “Andor” episodes this season. “Underneath everything, [Mothma is] a woman who was always ready to set fire to her life. To step out of the shadows and to risk it all on behalf of others, to stand up and use her voice against oppression.”
“This is a woman who doesn’t ever pick up a blaster,” she provides. “Her only weapon is her voice, and it’s really amazing to get an opportunity to see her use it and to be impactful.”
Genevieve O’Reilly says Mon Mothma has at all times been able to “to stand up and use her voice against oppression.”
(Kyle Galvin)
O’Reilly shares that when she first learn the script for the episode — written by “Nightcrawler” filmmaker Dan Gilroy, who additionally wrote Episodes 7 and eight — it solely included bits and items of the speech. “Andor” is a present about strange folks residing by (and preventing in opposition to) an more and more oppressive regime, and it’s not unusual for sequences to leap between a number of storylines on the identical time. Mothma’s speech was meant to be interwoven with different scenes, so the script simply featured the important thing traces that might be highlighted.
However showrunner Tony Gilroy understood the actor and her course of sufficient to know that O’Reilly would need to see extra. Even earlier than she had an opportunity to convey it up on her personal, he requested her if she wished the entire speech written out. He returned with everything of the speech inside a day of her responding, “Yes, please.”
“That was everything for me because there is such a musicality to that speech,” O’Reilly says. “It starts off and talks about her history. It talks about this holy place that she has grown up in. What she believes the Senate to be. And then it ends with her calling him [out].”
And when the episode’s director, Janus Metz, one of many few who had additionally been given the total textual content of the speech, requested if she would need to movie the entire thing, her response was “of course.”
“I went back and I worked on it,” O’Reilly says. “You carve it, and you create specific moments. As an actor, you’re part of the musicality of the piece. And then they used it, so that felt really special.”
For O’Reilly, the construction of “Andor’s” second season helped construct towards Mothma’s second with the speech. Throughout the season’s first three-episode arc, audiences see Mothma, spouse and mom, navigating deeply private moments and the strains in her relationships at her daughter Leida’s (Bronte Carmichael) conventional, extravagant, marathon marriage ceremony in her homeland.
“The most unexpected, dramatic, sometimes messy things happen at weddings,” she says, pointing to the dialog Mothma has with Leida simply earlier than the marriage ceremony about her mom at her personal marriage ceremony. “It felt deeply personal … Mon Mothma, in that very moment, she’s just opened herself completely and Leida just kind of sticks the knife in. So she has to button herself back up, figuratively put the mask back on, and go back outside … There’s no tricks. It’s really about relationship. It was really special.”
Leida (Bronte Carmichael), left, and Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) share a second on the former’s marriage ceremony.
(Lucasfilm Ltd.)
The subsequent arc, which spans from Episodes 4 to six, reveals Senator Mothma in motion as she tries to construct a coalition to struggle problematic coverage in addition to preserve her masks whereas unexpectedly having to work together with Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), a person who represents the whole lot she is preventing in opposition to.
“I could certainly feel it in every fiber of my body that she really wants to take him down,” says O’Reilly of Mothma’s mindset throughout their alternate. “It’s all she wants, but she can’t. She must stand there and spar a tiny bit, but in the end, she has to swallow what he’s serving because of the power he wields. And if she is exposed there, it’s all for nothing.”
She explains that “there is great danger” for Mothma as she manages the numerous masks she has to dwell behind whereas within the public eye.
“She’s stuck, but I think what the speech reveals in Episode 9 was that all of that was worth it,” O’Reilly says. “You could see what she had been holding all that time. You can feel it fly from her body.”
Mothma is a personality O’Reilly has been taking part in on and off in numerous “Star Wars” installments for 20 years. Initially solid to play the youthful model of the Riot chief portrayed by Caroline Blakiston within the 1983 movie “Return of the Jedi,” O’Reilly first stepped into the galaxy far, far-off for 2005’s prequel movie “Revenge of the Sith” — although most of her scenes landed on the chopping room flooring. She was then introduced again to reprise the character in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” the 2016 spinoff movie that takes place straight after the occasions of “Andor.” She’s since portrayed the character in “Ahsoka” in addition to the animated “Star Wars Rebels” (the latter of which is about throughout the identical years as “Andor”).
“I could never have expected that 20 years later I would be here playing the most fleshed out, dexterous, rich, enriched version of this woman,” says O’Reilly.
Along with Gilroy and his writing workforce, O’Reilly credit “Andor’s” hair and make-up designer Emma Scott and costume designer Michael Wilkinson for serving to convey Mothma to life, particularly this season. With Mothma being somebody that may be very deliberate in her wardrobe, O’Reilly says Wilkinson has “revealed character within the armor she chooses to wear each day.”
Perrin Fertha (Alastair Mackenzie), Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) and Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) in “Andor.”
(Lucasfilm Ltd.)
Whereas Blakiston’s Mothma didn’t have a lot display screen time, O’Reilly says what audiences do see is “a woman who has a weight, a gravitas, but also who has a deep empathy” and, simply as considerably, was a feminine chief of a riot in a film filmed within the Eighties. And he or she has at all times understood Mothma to be deeply socially acutely aware — whether or not that was what drove her to hitch the Galactic Senate or if it was her work representing folks for therefore a few years that woke up her social consciousness.
“I don’t know which way that happened, but I definitely feel that in her bones,” O’Reilly says. “I think the window into her history, into that orthodox culture that she has grown up in, probably helps you see what motivated that drive.”
And within the two seasons of “Andor,” O’Reilly — in addition to the viewers — has lastly been in a position to see a fuller image of Mothma and her backstory, in addition to a number of the ache the character endured to turn out to be the Insurgent Alliance chief “Star Wars” followers know.
“To have had the opportunity to come back and to really play, discover, and put flesh and blood and sinew and heartbeat into this woman, to really fill her out,” O’Reilly says. “She feels so beautifully human and complicated, and it’s really a version of her that I could have only hoped for.”
