Oscar-nominated costume designer Michael Wilkinson discusses the challenges and creative decisions behind designing costumes for ‘Andor’ that not only look stunning but also reveal the emotional depth of the show’s beloved characters.
“I loved the idea of treating Andor more like a serious, grown-up drama, rather than steering away from the usual idea of a high fantasy sci-fi universe. Tony really wanted to make it very grounded, very real and visceral, and have a real authenticity to it. I really thought that was a great approach to writing for Star Wars, and I wanted to bring that same authenticity and humanity to the costuming.”
Season 2 bridges the gap between Season 1 and the opening scene of ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.’ The season sees Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) becoming a key player in the growing Rebel Alliance. The stakes rise as people are tested and betrayals, sacrifices, and conflicting agenda become profound against the backdrop of political intrigue and danger. The twelve episodes that make up Season 2 see Cassian Andor grow from a cynical nobody into a hero of the Rebel Alliance.
Created by Tony Gilroy, ‘Andor’ stars Diego Luna, Stellan Skarsgård, Genevieve O’Reilly, Denise Gough, Kyle Soller, Adria Arjona, Alan Tudyk, Faye Marsay, Varada Sethu, Elizabeth Dulau, with Ben Mendelsohn and Forest Whitaker. The directing team consists of Ariel Kleiman (Eps. 1-6), Janus Metz (Eps. 7-9), Alonso Ruizpalacios (Eps. 10-12). Tony Gilroy, Beau Willimon, Dan Gilroy and Tom Bissell wrote the season 2 episodes.
Both seasons of ‘Andor’ are streaming on Disney+.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you today. How are you doing?
Michael Wilkinson: Very well, thank you.
AF: ‘Andor’ was your first foray into the ‘Star Wars’ universe. How did this opportunity come about?
Wilkinson: I interviewed for the job probably about 5 years ago. It seems like in another lifetime. I met a lot of the team from Lucasfilm. We seem to be like-minded creative spirits, so there was a lot of synchronicity there, and then I met up with Tony Gilroy and was really excited about his take on ‘Star Wars.’
I loved the idea of treating ‘Andor’ more like a serious, grown-up drama, rather than steering away from the usual idea of a high fantasy sci-fi universe. Tony really wanted to make it very grounded, very real and visceral, and have a real authenticity to it. I really thought that was a great approach to writing for ‘Star Wars,’ and I wanted to bring that same authenticity and humanity to the costuming. We were off to a really great start.
AF: Did Tony Gilroy offer much direction in terms of costume design or did you have a lot of free reign in terms of what to do?
Wilkinson: I did have a lot of free rein, both from Tony and from Kathleen Kennedy at Lucasfilm. I think they really wanted to be surprised and create something that was true to the brand of ‘Star Wars,’ but would take sort of things off in a modern and very interesting new direction.
The feedback and the guidance for costumes from Tony was very much just to keep everything very real, and to treat the characters as very three-dimensional people. The writing is very detailed so I also wanted to bring that same detail to the costumes, to think about things. Why they were wearing what they were wearing, not just because they looked cool and ‘Star Wars’-y.
But actually, why they made the decisions of the textures, the details, the layers, and the silhouettes that they chose—that was a real expression of who they were, how they felt about themselves, what culture they were from. There was lots of really detailed thinking that went into the creation of all of these characters.
AF: As a costume designer, is it helpful when a number of planets—such as Yavin 4 and Coruscant—and characters have been established in the wider ‘Star Wars’ universe for years?
Wilkinson: I think it is. I think the interesting thing about ‘Andor’ is that you’re taking the ‘Star Wars’ canon, the existing over 30 years of storytelling and taking that as a jumping off point. But then, there’s plenty of new planets and new characters that you have to create from this essential ‘Star Wars’ DNA. That was really enjoyable for me.
One of the things I love about ‘Andor’ is this sense of world building. For a lot of the new planets, I worked a lot with the production designer, Luke Hull, and really built these cultures with him from the ground up. We talked about what resources were available to these people on the different planets to make their built environments, to make their clothing, what the climate was like, what their customs and beliefs were, how they reflected these things in their culture and their clothing.
That was really exciting to really dive deep into these nine different planets. Some of which existed and needed to be fleshed out, some which were being seen for the very first time. That was a wonderful creative process to go through.
AF: One of those planets being seen for the first time has an important role in ‘Star Wars’ lore. What were some of the conversations taking place about the inspiration or references when it came to the planet Ghorman?
Wilkinson: Ghorman was a wonderful design challenge for us all. What we wanted to express with that culture was almost like the very best of human culture. These people have a fantastic work ethic. They’re creating beautiful things that they’re very proud of on this planet. There’s a tremendous sense of camaraderie and solidarity within the community. They’re very tight knit. They represent a very rich, proud, and historic world.
With their costumes, I wanted to reflect a very restrained, elegant urbane dignity, I guess, with their clothing. We looked a lot at Europe in, I guess, the middle of the 20th century. Paris, Milan—cities like that in the 1940s and 1950s. The resistance movements there during the Second World War were very influential to our aesthetic there.
I had to build a whole culture. We did everything from policemen, schoolchildren, resistance fighters, leading figures of the community—really a whole spectrum of society. We had about 500 extras that we created costumes from scratch, and I said I wanted to treat each of those as individuals to get this real sense of dense humanity on Ghorman.
AF: I definitely felt something of a Paris aesthetic when I was watching.
Wilkinson: Yeah. I’m glad you got that.
AF: What about Cassian’s wardrobe when he first travels to Ghorman and goes undercover as a fashion designer?
Wilkinson: That was a lot of fun for me, as you can imagine. When I read that in the script—that his alias was a fashion designer coming to Ghorman to sample fabrics for his new collection—that really set my creative juices flowing.
It was also wonderful to show Cassian in a completely different way than audiences are used to seeing him. He had a very sleek, minimal urban feel to him, deep purpley black tones with crisp white shirts. We created lots of personal accessories, tie pins, sunglasses or visor for him, lots of beautiful, flowing, rich fabrics.
It was a completely different Cassian than we’ve ever seen before, and that was important, because he came back a second time to Ghorman with a different alias as a Ronni Googe, who is a reporter, a war correspondent, if you like, who would go to different planets and cover different stories, so that persona had a completely different vibe. He had a comfortable vibe to him, washed out colors, linens and leathers, and a layered look that would be comfortable in any culture that he dropped in on to report. So yeah, fun creating these two completely contrasting personas for him on Ghorman.
AF: How did you go about designing costumes in a way that felt both true to Ghorman and the wider ‘Star Wars’ universe?
Wilkinson: I think what we do is we take a bit of George Lucas’s advice with that. I love how George always wanted to have a little bit of reference from our world—from Earth—for all of the different cultures that he created, whether it was Tibetan influences, the Middle East, or Africa. There was always something about the cultures that he created in his films that the audience could relate to and connect with, and see, Okay, I can see the references there. These are not fantasy figures that I have no connection with, but there’s something about them that resonates.
With the people of Ghorman, I really tried to have this aesthetic of Paris and Italy in the 1950s as a leaping point that people could see these visual triggers and references that would connect them with the people of Ghorman. I went about really stylizing, minimalizing the lines and the references from Europe in the 1940s and 1950s and bringing ‘Star Wars’ elements to them—accessories and minimal detailing that made them feel more a part of the ‘Star Wars’ world that we all know and love.
AF: What was the most challenging aspect when it came to working on the second season?
Wilkinson: I think just the sheer scale of it all. It was such a massive undertaking! We had four months of prep. We had a massive eight-month shoot, which was just a real marathon—day after day of interesting detailed costumes, new cultures to establish.
I think there was about eight and a half hours of storytelling. When you think about that, that’s almost like doing four ‘Star Wars’ feature films back-to-back, one after the other. Every frame had to be beautiful, interesting, engaging, and imaginative. I think just to keep that flowing for a year was the biggest challenge for me, but something that myself and my team, I think, really jumped on as a wonderful opportunity.
AF: Were there any particular goals that you had in mind for Cassian Andor, Mon Mothma, or Luthen Rael?
Wilkinson: Let’s see, have we talked about Mon Mothma?
AF: Not yet.
Wilkinson: Yeah. Okay. Well, the world of Chandrila was something I was very excited about establishing. We haven’t really spent much time in Chandrila in other corners of ‘Star Wars’ storytelling so I really wanted to establish this world in a way that would reflect and help us understand Mon Mothma, who is our principal character from Chandrila.
What I wanted to get with the costuming from Chandrila was this wonderful sense of ancient tradition, ritual, restraint, formality. We had this three-day wedding event that’s covered in the first three episodes of ‘Andor’ season 2 that established this very formal ritualistic world. That was important to me, because to understand Mon Mothma and to really appreciate her struggle, you have to have a sense of this very rigid society that she comes from.
In fact, she leads this double life. She is this incredibly sophisticated senator, her representing her planet on Coruscant, this wonderful planet that is very much to do with the government of the galaxy and serving the Empire. But at the same time, she has this double life funneling funds into the Rebel Alliance and trying to get that started in the background.
There’s a sense of her, of always the mask that she’s wearing, is the mask going to be slipping. With her costumes. I wanted to show her pushing and being restrained by her clothing and having empathy of the vulnerability that she had behind these costumes. I think that’s sort of exemplified the best, perhaps, in her costume that she wears to the wedding in Episode 3, where you have this very formal pleated, complicated layered costume that she’s wearing.
But in the final moments of Episode 3, she breaks out. She needs to escape, to find some release from this horrible prison of her existence, and so she loses herself in this dance sequence. I wanted the costume to really flow with her and be able to express this lack of restraint. I created a costume in these flowing, pleated silks and lines and details of the costumes that would help the fabric really swirl, and her to lose herself in this swirling crowd of colors and pleated fabrics.
I think that those last images of Episode 3 are really satisfying for me because they are a real representation, using the costumes of what the characters are going through at that time.
AF: What about Luthen?
Wilkinson: Well, Luthen has an incredible character arc with his costumes in season 2. He also has a double life. Of course, he comes across as a very trustworthy, smooth owner of an art gallery on Coruscant—the sort of person that you would pour all of your secrets to, and feel very comfortable with, which is exactly what he wants.
He wants to be gathering information and intelligence from people in Coruscant. but at the same time, he also has a persona, which we call the natural Luthen, which is, I guess, essentially his real character, when he is not the smooth gallery owner. He is someone who is out in the world trying to get the Rebel Alliance up and running, and so it was great to sort of show those two sides of him.
But also, we had this wonderful opportunity in one of the last episodes to show his backstory. We see him over a 30-year period, and how he’s gone from a ragged, disgruntled, disillusioned soldier of the Imperial army, which is a surprise in itself, and then how he then develops and ends up as this very smooth, well off, well-financed intelligence gatherer on Coruscant.
We see, step by step, how he gets more and more confident, more resources. He works out his hustle, how he can get information from people, transmit that information to his sources across the galaxy, to try and get the Rebel Alliance going. We see this real progression in his clothing to become the Luthen that we finally know him as on Coruscant.
AF: Did you have any favorite costumes from working on the series?
Wilkinson: I really enjoyed creating Cassian’s clothing this season. He had about 17 different changes, lots of different personas and disguises I really like.
There’s a costume that he wears when he’s on a mission extracting Mon Mothma from the Senate. I think it’s Episode 9. I created this look for him as a journalist going into the Senate, and supposedly reporting on what’s going on there. But it’s something that he has to extract Mon Mothma out of the Senate wearing.
He ends up taking his trench coat off and putting it on Mon Mothma sort of to disguise her from the usual very elegant pale colors that she’s wearing. She puts this sort of heroes Star wars jacket on, and I love that moment. It really feels like she’s finally shedding her sophisticated senator persona and becoming a figure within the Rebel Alliance with this great Cassian heroic overcoat over the top of her clothing. I really like that costume moment in season. 2.
AF: I’ve seen Episode 9 and re-watched the “Secret Cargo” episode of ‘Star Wars Rebels’ back-to-back G-d knows how many times now, since getting the screeners.
Wilkinson: Yeah.
AF: Probably even more, after the third block of episodes launched on Disney+. Was there any direction as far as continuity side of things, seeing as how both shows are canon, because we have the Holonet—where she’s not wearing the blue senatorial robe—and then in the show, where she’s dressed slightly different. It’s one of those things that I keep thinking about.
Wilkinson: I think one of the exciting things about working within the ‘Star Wars’ universe and designing for that world is the incredible wealth of visual material there are. There’re so many corners of the millions of stories of all the different hundreds of characters within ‘Star Wars’ that’s been covered by the films, by the graphic novels, by the animations, by the TV shows. It’s a wonderful wealth of details.
I think what one has to do when you join the team of a new storytelling corner of the ‘Star Wars’ universe—for example, Andor—you have to have to work out what your take is going to be. You are there to tell the story that your scriptwriters and showrunners have created so you do your research. You work out how all of these characters have been portrayed in all the different iterations throughout the ‘Star Wars’ universe.
And then you take that and then you make decisions about what is going to tell your particular story in the strongest and most compelling way.
That’s why I decided for Mon Mothma to put her in this blue senatorial robe. I thought that would be the most compelling version for our environment. She takes that off. She’s white on white in this beautiful Senate world and then she puts the dark as Cassian overcoat over the top of that to hide from her usual clothing and the colors that you would associate with Mon Mothma.
So little things like that. I think it’s all to do with the storytelling within your episodes and within the world of your particular ‘Star Wars’ story.
So yeah, so it’s a wonderful thing to take the canon, learn from it, and then sort of use it as a leaping point to tell your story in the strongest and most compelling way.
AF: It was so nice getting to talk with you this afternoon. Best of luck.
Wilkinson: Thank you so much, Danielle, lovely to chat with you.