Disney announced on Monday evening that it will be holding a livestream Q&A for season 2 of its Star Wars drama Andor on Tuesday, May 14, at 12 p.m. ET. The stream will be hosted on YouTube, and will center on series creator, writer, and showrunner Tony Gilroy and star Diego Luna, though other guests from the show will also be present. Here’s the embedded livestream and the description of the event:
In anticipation of the three-episode series finale of Andor, join Diego Luna and Creator & Executive Producer Tony Gilroy as they take us behind-the-scenes of the show’s final season. Diego and Tony will be joined by special guests Adria Arjona, Denise Gough, Elizabeth Dulau, Genevieve O’Reilly and Kyle Soller for live questions and reflections across their Star Wars journeys. With special appearances by some of your favorite creators including @HeroesReforged, @CatherineLaSalle, and @MaceAhWindu.
Two things about this livestream feel unusual: First, it’s dropping right before the season and series finale of Andor, which goes live on Disney Plus at 9 p.m. ET on May 14, so fans won’t be able to ask questions that take the end of the season into account. (Likely a measure to avoid spoilers for people who haven’t watched yet.) And second, Disney says the participants will be taking live questions from viewers.
As anyone who’s ever attended a live Q&A with significantly famous folk probably already knows, these kinds of forums rarely produce really great questions. That’s more often true in a live setting, where questioners often just want to hold the attention of those famous people, and tend to ramble or not ask questions at all. “This is more a comment than a question…” and “As a content creator myself, here are my thoughts on your work…” are clichés that still crop up at nearly every audience Q&A I attend at film festivals. And I will never forget attending a live-on-stage George Lucas interview that made time for questions at the end. A young man with a Chewbacca-bandolier messenger bag and no compunctions about wasting everyone else’s time got up to brag to Lucas about how many Moleskine notebooks full of story ideas he had back home, and ended with, “So my question is, Mr. Lucas, what can I do for you?” Lucas was… not gentle in his response.
Collectively, we can do better. The key to a good Q&A is preparation — thinking in advance about questions that matter to you, then checking to see if maybe the participants have already answered that exact question elsewhere. (E.g. “Hey, Tony Gilroy, were you thinking of Nazi Germany when you wrote this show, or something more recent?”) And it’s important to be as specific as possible with questions — “What was the hardest part of the show to do?” isn’t a bad one, but it’s broad enough that it could be applied to any aspect of the writing, casting, shooting, editing, or post-production work, and might not get a particularly specific answer.
So let’s pregame this interview. What, at this point, do you want to know from Tony Gilroy and Diego Luna (or any other promised participant in this project) that you think they haven’t already answered? What would you most like to hear them talk about? Personally, I’d like to know whether Gilroy ever considered any other end to Syril Karn’s arc. Not saying there’s anything wrong with what we saw on screen — Gilroy has called it a “Greek and dramatic” ending — but I really thought he was being set up for something else specific.
What do you most want to ask the Andor creator and cast? (If nothing else, maybe the rest of us can help find a place where your question has already been answered, since there’s going to be a lot of competition to get questions through during the livestream.)
