Spoilers for Episodes 8 through 10 of Andor below.
What a treat it was to see Andy Serkis appear on Andor. The multi-hyphenate artist last appeared in Star Wars: The Last Jedi as Supreme Leader Snoke, wherein he met the business end of a lightsaber. While it’s not uncommon for franchises to reuse actors—Gemma Chan appeared in two different Marvel movies, for example—it felt shocking to see such a high-profile actor show up with little fanfare. That’s part of the brilliance of a show like Andor, as it’s constantly keeping you on your toes—and something Serkis himself realized when talking with series creator Tony Gilroy. “When he explained about the character and the journey that this character would take, I was taken with it,” Serkis told Complex in a recent interview. “He’s such a masterful storyteller and a brilliant showrunner.”
The first assumption for some Star Wars fans would be that Serkis would be here as some sort of prequel set-up for Snoke, but Andor quickly establishes that his character, Kino Loy, is just a normal dude who Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) meets when he enters an Imperial prison. Kino is a shift manager tasked with keeping Andor and his fellow inmates on schedule producing materials for the Empire. Kino is hard-nosed, but he’s not a bad guy. He’s simply here to work his shifts and get released. That is until he and Andor find out they’re not going home after they’ve served their time. Instead, they’ll simply get reassigned to another part of the prison. The only way out is to revolt.
As the last episode of this arc of Andor comes to a close, Complex spoke with Serkis about the mental aspects of shooting in a prison-like environment, how he developed Kino’s backstory, shooting a riot, and much more.