Disney’s Star Wars: Andor executive producer Tony Gilroy claimed in a recent interview that his “good senator” character is fashioned after Nancy Pelosi, “trying to do good” for the rebels fighting the empire.
In episode four, entitled “Aldhani,” we see the heist planned by rebel forces beginning to come into focus, but we also learn that Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), a senator from the planet Chandrila, is part of a cabal inside the Empire that is secretly helping to fund the rebel scheme.
The Mothma character debuted in 2005’s Revenge of the Sith before being depicted as a major rebel leader in Star Wars Rebels as well as 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Now, in a series that will fill in far more of Mothma’s back story, we find that showrunner Gilroy thinks his character who is putting her life at risk by bankrolling rebels is a “Nancy Pelosi character.”
Actress Fiona Shaw previously claimed that Gilroy’s Andor series is meant to portray the evil Empire as a “Trumpian” world where “people’s rights are disappearing.” And now, piling onto that conception, Gilroy claims that his model for the good guys is the Democrat Party, and in particular Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
“Anyone who follows the canon — she’s sort of a Nancy Pelosi character, isn’t she?” Gilroy said in a recent interview, according to IndieWire. “She’s kind of trying to do good or whatever she’s trying to do, and she’s losing — I mean, I don’t know.”
“She a powerful presence in the Senate but she’s facing defeat after defeat after defeat as the Empire is taking over here. She’s always presented as very proper and sober and perfectly put together all the time in canon and it just seemed like that was such a perfect opportunity to say, ‘Well what’s really going on behind here?’ It was very exciting to take a sort of still portrait of someone and throw it away and build a real life behind it,” Gilroy said appearing to claim that Nancy Pelosi is a “put together” person.
“She has a much, much, much more complicated life [than] anybody was ever aware, and in many ways, of all the people that walk through this show and face all kinds of decisions and problems and pressures and the hiding and chasing and betrayal — she has to stand out almost in the open for the whole show, in a really dangerous position,” Gilroy concluded. “In many ways her story is the most tense story in the whole show, because she has to do everything in the open.”
Mothma actress O’Reilly herself had other extreme, left-wing politicians in mind when playing her Andor part. In an interview of her own, O’Reilly claimed that she used Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and GOP traitor Liz Cheney as models for her Mothma depiction.
Using Democrats as a shining example of freedom is an interesting contrast to the actual party which is trying to eliminate freedom of speech, cancel the law of the land, U.S. Constitution, end judicial autonomy by packing courts with “judges” beholding to an agenda, not the rule of law, and labeling political opponents as terrorists.
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