SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Episodes 7, 8 and 9 of “Andor” Season 2, now streaming on Disney+.
“Who are you?”
Despite all their years of playing cat-and-mouse, Diego Luna’s rebel spy Cassian Andor and Kyle Soller‘s Empire agent Syril Karn have never had much screen time together — until now. Unfortunately for Syril, their meeting is short-lived as he takes a blaster shot to the head amid the tragic Ghorman Massacre.
The political tension and civil unrest on Ghorman finally hits a breaking point in the latest “Andor” episodes. The Empire is going ahead with its secret mining plot, and soon the entire planet of Ghorman will be rendered unstable. Despite feeding inside information about the rebels’ plans to his Imperial supervisors, Syril is caught off-guard and feels betrayed by his partner Dedra (Denise Gough), who knew the truth all along. He snaps and briefly chokes Dedra, demanding that she tell him what the Empire’s really up to. She promises him that soon they’ll have a better life and points out that he didn’t mind all the promotions while the Empire was planning for Ghorman’s destruction. He leaves, unsure of what to do with himself, as chaos erupts between the Imperial and rebel forces.
Amidst the massacre, Syril spots Cassian in the riot as he takes aim at Dedra. Syril tackles him before he can get a shot off, and the two have an all-out brawl. They slam each other around, and for a moment, Syril has the upper hand as he grabs Cassian’s gun and prepares to shoot. Just as things look bleak for Cassian, he simply asks Syril, “Who are you?” The question freezes Syril in his tracks. The moment of existential uncertainty is just enough time for Ghorman leader Carro Rylanz (Richard Sammel), who had previously welcomed Syril into the rebels’ inner circles, to shoot him. With that, Cassian escapes and Syril becomes another casualty in the Ghorman Massacre.
With Variety, Soller gets deep on Syril’s death, becoming a “feral cat” in his fight scene with Luna and how “prescient” the Ghorman Massacre is in today’s world.
When did you find out that this would be how Syril’s story comes to an end?
Tony Gilroy approached the entire project with such a forensic intensity. He was mapping five years from the very beginning and knew the scope and the scale of every character. He didn’t tell me until between Seasons 1 and 2. I thought it was a perfect ending for him. It felt like just before something else could happen to Syril, it’s taken away. So much had been taken away from him within the last 10 minutes of his life, all these revelations and betrayals coming to light, the veil being lifted from all the truths he held to be right about the Empire and the choices in his life completely crumbling. Instead of having a redemption story, I think it was much stronger and much more real to life. For all of Syril’s vanity, romanticism and delusions of grandeur about himself, he’s just another cog in the wheel. He’s just another casualty of war.
He unleashes a ferocious side of himself that we’d never seen before when he fights Cassian. Where did that come from?
I’d always seen Syril as someone with hidden depths, and thought he was secretly incredibly angry. It’s very clear he grew up in a controlling environment under constant surveillance, so it wasn’t surprising that he had this untapped anger within him. We thought it’d be interesting to look at places where that could come out, with Rylanz confronting him, the betrayal with Dedra then ultimately with Cassian. Syril has expanded himself in Ghorman, he’s starting to let loose, getting more power and connecting to his essence. Underneath all that, he knows that he’s being manipulated by Dedra, but he doesn’t want to admit it. There’s this brewing anger going on. Ultimately, that’s someone who has been lied to their entire life, who drank the Kool-Aid since they were a kid. He opened up himself to a new way of thinking with Rylanz and intimacy with Dedra. He has that betrayed, and then to see this person, this totem, that represents everything he has not been able to achieve on that path in Cassian, and then tack on the riot and massacre, he has a very personal explosion and an exorcism of all the bad things the Empire has done to him. I saw those intense moments as weirdly cathartic for him, because he’s finally having this release, and ultimately really tragic, he’s only releasing the pain that was inflicted upon him.
What were the rehearsals like for that fight scene between you and Diego Luna?
We were rehearsing for quite a bit. It was a longer fight scene they cut down. We filmed it in three days, which, for a fight scene that insane and ambitious at the tail end of a two-week period of doing the whole Ghorman massacre, everybody was absolutely fucked. But it was kind of perfect, because they needed to be at their end. We wanted it to seem like Syril was this feral cat that you just couldn’t get off your back. In this whole revelation that’s happened to him, some unexpected, primal thing is released. It was wild. We were also filming it in the end of January, so it was really cold and intense, but we were lit up. It’s kind of a blur, but I remember being in a lot of pain, but also really happy.
What was cut out?
There were some longer beats. There was a big question of whether, when the explosion happens, is Syril still on his feet or he’s maybe dead or something that loops into the end beat between the two of them. This fight is unexpectedly equal; on any other day, Cassian would beat the shit out of Syril, no question. But Syril has this superpower released by everything that’s happened to him. It was really delicate, trying to get to that moment of who’s got the upper hand at the end and Syril unexpectedly coming around with Cassian’s gun. Then the final question to Syril. There were three or four different things Cassian was going to say, and they finally ended up on “who are you?” which I think was perfect because that breaks Syril in that moment. “Oh, my God. My obsession doesn’t even know who I am.” How gutting is that?
What other lines was Cassian going to say to Syril at the end?
It was a short list: “You” and “it’s you” and “who are you?” It just completely cuts him in that moment. If Cassian had said “it’s you,” would Syril have had more resolve to do something or would he still have lowered his gun? I don’t know, but in terms of Syril’s arc, it just perfectly completes the journey being used by powers that are bigger than you in this huge machine and mayhem of life. You think you’ve made a difference, but you haven’t.
What would Syril have gone on to do if he had survived?
I don’t think he would have gone and joined either side in the fight. It’s like leaving a cult, or somebody telling you we just live in a hologram and you’re in the Matrix, I think he would have just spun out and wanted to go off alone somewhere. It’s really hard to imagine everything you held to be true is false, the people around you that you thought were your people have been dicking you over from day one and you’re just a pawn in this machine of war. I think he would have wandered off and opened up a blue milk stall somewhere on some distant mountain.
Here’s another hypothetical for you: If Syril and Dedra had switched places and he knew about the Empire’s plan, would he have told Dedra about it?
I wonder if he would have cracked, because ultimately it feels like, though they are cut from similar cloths and have similar upbringings, Dedra is a true, hardcore believer. Syril is one of those “banality of evil,” a man who got caught up in propaganda and drinking the Kool-Aid as a kid. At the end of the day, we’re talking about heart percentage and who’s got more. I think Syril has a little bit more. You see it with what happens on Ghorman. I don’t think it’s just gullibility and naivety. You see a crack opening up in the armor that he’s put around himself.
The Ghorman Massacre was filmed long ago, but watching it in today’s political climate with the Israel-Palestine conflict feels so eerily relevant. What is it like watching that scene now?
It’s heavy. It made me realize that really great writing is timeless. Really great writers will be looking at the past to explain the present, which ultimately predicts the future. That’s what George Lucas was doing at the very beginning, and it’s all Tony was doing with this, looking at the run-up to World War II. In a way, there’s nothing new under the sun. You could show “Andor” 50 years ago or 50 years from now, and I bet, unfortunately, there would be a section of the Earth where people would find it extremely relevant because we’re still cycling through the same shit that we’ve been cycling through. No one could have predicted that it would feel extremely prescient, but that’s a testament to really true writing that is excavating our human desires, faults and emotions and questioning how we are with each other on this planet.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
