Andor Star Cheers Season 2's 'All-Out Weird' Dedra/Syril Connection: 'Not Your Average Rom-Com!'
The two halves of a rather odd couple each play important and distinct roles in Season 2 of Andor, the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story prequel series that returns Tuesday, April 22 at 9/8c (with weekly, 3-episode drops).
Season 1 of the acclaimed drama built to a climax at the funeral for the titular Cassian Andor's (Diego Luna) mother. In a pre-recorded hologram, Maarva delivered a final rallying cry — "Fight the Empire!" — at which point the crowd pressed on toward the front line of Imperial soldiers, and a melee ensued.
Amid the chaos, as Cassian slipped through the streets with his partner Bix (Adria Arjona), ISB supervisor Dedra Meero (played by Denise Gough) was surprised to find herself saved from a trampling by Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), a wonk for the Imperial Bureau of Standards. Syril has been out to catch the murderer of two Morlana-One corpos (that'd be Cassian), while Dedra has been hunting the elusive "Axis" aka Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), a key architect of the rebellion.
Picking up one year later, Season 2 finds Dedra working a top-secret new assignment from Director Orson Krennic (Rogue One's Ben Mendelsohn); Syril in turn does what he can, in his own special ways, to help the ISB.
Oh, did we mention that Dedra and Syril now share a Coruscant flat? Where they sometimes have Syril's mom, Eedy (scene stealer Kathryn Hunter), over for dinner? So, are they in a relationship, some sort of "arrangement," or...?
Watch a clip (via KTLA) below, then read on for more:
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Reflecting on the duo's "meet cute" (as she puts it) on Ferrix, Denise Gough shared with TVLine that "I had a fear when he rescued her at the end of Season 1, because so often in a film or a TV show, a woman gets rescued by a man, falls in love with him, and then she loses her entire character. Like, everything that was written about her before the love thing happens is gone! And I naively thought that [Andor creator] Tony Gilroy was going to do that to Dedra."
It however soon became quite evident to the Irish actress that "that's exactly what I was — naive."
For Season 2, "Tony [Gilroy] went full, all-out weird with this connection" between Dedra and Syril, Gough effused. "I mean, I laugh about it, but at the same time, it is actually quite an extraordinary study of two people who are not adept at, well, anything social, but certainly not true intimacy, so I think they're both sort of trying to navigate the things that happen in one system when they're falling in love, or in an intimate situation....
"I don't speak for Kyle," Gough added with a nod to her scene partner seated next to her during the TVLine Zoom, "but Dedra's never had that before, so it's all creeping up into her." As a result, in Season 2 "she starts making decisions that are maybe less focused than she would have made in Season 1, when there wasn't a love interest."
Rest assured, Dedra is still a total badass on a mission, and Syril is willing to go to (almost) any lengths to advance the Imperial cause. Meaning, what the two share "is definitely not your average rom-com!" insists Gough.
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