“The only people who know what she’s going through are her and you in your living room. There are hundreds of people in that ballroom—nobody else has
“The only people who know what she’s going through are her and you in your living room. There are hundreds of people in that ballroom—nobody else has any clue what’s happening,” Gilroy says. “It binds you to her, in a way. You’ve been through something together that no one else has seen.”
To the onlookers at that galactic wedding, her dance just looks like exuberance. “They think, ‘Oh, that’s the mother of the bride, and she’s having a great day. Too much to drink. Isn’t that fun? Let’s party on!’” Gilroy says. “And that is so not what’s happening.”
Mon Mothma is actually pre-grieving. The friend she knows will be killed is alive—but not for long. She could stop his murder, but deep down she knows she has to allow it. Tay Kolma was a banker and childhood friend who helped her hide funds for the underground Rebellion. But when he hints at blackmail to recoup his personal financial losses, the only indefinite solution is the unspeakable.
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Gilroy made the unusual choice of not showing the character’s actual murder, to better reflect how Mothma would experience his disappearance. When Kolma leaves the party, his regular driver has been replaced by someone Andor viewers recognize as the Rebel assassin Cinta Kaz (Varada Sethu).
“She does not know exactly how it’s going to happen,” Gilroy says. “They can’t find a body. He just never shows up again.”
That also gives her slight deniability to rationalize what happened. “He went to the farm upstate,” Gilroy jokes.
The origins of “Niamos! (Chandrilan Club Mix)” go back to the first season of Andor. Composer Nicholas Britell, best known for the theme to Succession, featured it as a piece of background music in a sequence when Diego Luna’s title character visits an intergalactic beachside resort. The name of this planet gave the track its name. (The remix subtitle comes from Chandrila, Mon Mothma’s homeworld.)
Star Wars obsessives fixated on the upbeat number, mesmerized by the notion of an actual pop song from within the Star Wars universe. Then the theme resurfaced in the wedding scene from episode three of the second season, and finally broke through to the mainstream. “When it came back, I remember shouting out ‘Niamos!’ and then they actually shout it in the song,” Damon says. “The song is already such a banger that I think people were excited to hear it again. But then it’s also this happy song playing over such a tense and sad moment. I think the juxtaposition of that caught a lot of fans’ eyes.”
The wedding version of the song is significantly reworked from the original by season two’s composer Brandon Roberts, who won an Emmy for cowriting the score to the 2018 mountain-climbing documentary Free Solo. “It’s just about adding new elements that you think hype it up, everything from percussion to synthesized elements to changing the actual balance of things,” Roberts tells Vanity Fair.
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