Upcoming Star Wars Disney Plus TV show Andor began filming in late 2020, with actor Diego Luna reprising his role as the Rebel soldier from 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. If you were hoping to see his entertaining robot companion K-2SO in the show, however, you might be out of luck – actor Alan Tudyk, who both voiced and mo-capped the character, says he's not in the series.
Still, Tudyk says he could appear in the show eventually – it sounds like it depends if the show continues beyond its opening salvo of 12 episodes.
"They're shooting it right now, I'm not in it. But, if it stays on the air, stories keep getting told, I'll end up in there," Tudyk told Collider. This is despite Tudyk appearing at the D23 event in 2019 promoting the show.
This suggests Andor could be an ongoing series with multiple seasons like The Mandalorian, rather than a limited series like the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi show featuring Ewan McGregor.
In the Star Wars canon, Cassian Andor finds and reprograms K-2SO, who was an Imperial security droid. That's surely a story they'll want to tell in the TV show at some point, and we'd be surprised if it wasn't at least addressed in the first set of episodes.
In the same interview, Tudyk suggests his time playing the character is finite, simply because it has incredible physical demands.
"I do know this: I have to be on stilts for it, because the character is 7'1", and I'm not one of those guys that says, 'somebody else do the motion capture, and I'll voice it later'. I'll have to do the motion capture, and I turn 50 in March," Tudyk explained. "So I hope they get to it soon, because I'm not going to be on stilts in, like, five years. I'm not doing it!"
Andor's announced ensemble cast doesn't include Tudyk, but you can expect to see Stellan Skarsgard, Adria Arjona, Fiona Shaw, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller and Genevieve O’Reilly in the show. It's going to be a big deal – over 200 named characters will be in the series when it begins in 2022.
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What will this show be like?
This raises further questions about what ground the Andor series will actually cover. The show is set five years before the events of Rogue One, suggesting it'll explore the machinations of the Rebel Alliance in the time leading up the Battle of Yavin. It's been described as a 'tense spy thriller' by Lucasfilm.
K-2SO worked so well in Rogue One because he brought a little life out of what we'd argue was a reasonably flat ensemble of characters – and an entire show of him wisecracking with Cassian while they take on the Empire would've been pretty cool.
Still, we can't wait to see what Lucasfilm has come up with regardless.
