When Dan Gilroy sat down in 2022-23 to write Mon Mothma’s Senate speech for the season 2 episode of Andor titled “Welcome to the Rebellion,” Donald Trump had completed his first administration but what had “started with him was building now in the Senate and Congress.”
The speech by Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), who goes on to lead the Rebel Alliance, was meant to address the growing threat that is Emperor Palpatine. Gilroy remembers thinking about real life developments when he had Mon Mothma deliver such fighting words as “the distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss” and “the death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.”
“When I’m writing that speech, I’m pissed off. I’m pissed off right now,” said Gilroy during the recent Sublime Primetime Drama Panel at the Writers Guild in Los Angeles. “What this character has seen through the course of the show is her senate colleagues abandoning everything they believe out of expediency and cowardice and leaving their constituents to pure evil, to an emperor who used to be a politician. So as I’m writing the speech, which is really the climax of that episode, I’m also deeply aware … of what was going on in our world at that time. I’m watching Senators being held to a standard of things of what they [said they once] believed in, and then utterly abandon them out of expediency and cowardice.”Writer
Gilroy is up for his first Emmy this year in the Outstanding Drama Writing category for penning “Welcome to the Rebellion.” He was nominated alongside R. Scott Gemmill and Joe Sachs, both from The Pitt, as well as Dan Erickson (Severance), Mike White (The White Lotus) and Will Smith (Slow Horses).
“A lot of people draw parallels between what’s going on in our world and the show. And I think those parallels very much exist,” continued Gilroy during the WGA panel, which also included Gemmill, Sachs and Erickson. “What I like about this episode, what I like about the show, is we’ve provided a way for people to articulate their anxiety, to sort of have discussions about political morality, to serve as witness to what’s going on. The show is really about speaking truth in the face of authority. And people are making commitments in our show that lead to their death, that lead to the loss of everything they’ve held dear, that lead to the death of people who they love. They’ve made a decision that they’re going to speak truth to authority because the universe is being taken over by evil. It’s very strange to work on a show when you feel like your universe is being taken over by evil and you’re putting words in people’s mouth and giving them decisions. And you’re asking yourself, ‘would I die for that?’ Because really that’s what these characters are doing.”
See Mon Mothma’s speech below.
