Genevieve O’Reilly on Mon Mothma’s pivotal ‘Andor’ speech: ‘Her only weapon is her voice’
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This story contains spoilers for “Andor” Season 2, Episode 9.
Senator Mon Mothma is finally, openly, part of the rebellion.
In the ninth episode of “Andor” Season 2, the senator from Chandrila, played by Genevieve O’Reilly, publicly denounces the Empire in a speech from her pod in the Imperial Senate.
“The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil,” says Mothma as she challenges the official narrative spun to cover up the “unprovoked genocide” on Ghorman. “When truth leaves us … when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to … whatever monsters scream the loudest.”
She then declares Emperor Palpatine is a monster and becomes the Empire’s most prominent public enemy.
Tony Gilroy, creator and executive producer of ‘Andor,’ relied on his brothers Dan, a writer, and John, an executive producer and editor, to finish the latest season of the ‘Star Wars’ series.
In established “Star Wars” lore, this is a moment that will directly lead to the formal declaration of the Rebel Alliance. It’s also one, according to O’Reilly, that Mothma has always been ready for.
“That’s the fulcrum of who the woman is,” says O’Reilly while seated in a Beverly Hills hotel bar last month. With branches of flowers hanging from the ceiling, the room’s decor is almost reminiscent of that of the Chandrilan wedding seen in earlier “Andor” episodes this season. “Underneath everything, [Mothma is] a woman who was always ready to set fire to her life. To step out of the shadows and to risk it all on behalf of others, to stand up and use her voice against oppression.”
“This is a woman who doesn’t ever pick up a blaster,” she adds. “Her only weapon is her voice, and it’s really amazing to get an opportunity to see her use it and to be impactful.”
O’Reilly shares that when she first read the script for the episode — written by “Nightcrawler” filmmaker Dan Gilroy, who also wrote Episodes 7 and 8 — it only included bits and pieces of the speech. “Andor” is a show about ordinary people living through (and fighting against) an increasingly oppressive regime, and it’s not uncommon for sequences to jump between multiple storylines at the same time. Mothma’s speech was intended to be interwoven with other scenes, so the script just featured the key lines that would be highlighted.
But showrunner Tony Gilroy understood the actor and her process enough to know that O’Reilly would want to see more. Even before she had a chance to bring it up on her own, he asked her if she wanted the whole speech written out. He returned with the entirety of the speech within a day of her responding, “Yes, please.”
“That was everything for me because there is such a musicality to that speech,” O’Reilly says. “It starts off and talks about her history. It talks about this holy place that she has grown up in. What she believes the Senate to be. And then it ends with her calling him [out].”
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And when the episode’s director, Janus Metz, one of the few who had also been given the full text of the speech, asked if she would want to film the whole thing, her response was “of course.”
“I went back and I worked on it,” O’Reilly says. “You carve it, and you create specific moments. As an actor, you’re part of the musicality of the piece. And then they used it, so that felt really special.”
For O’Reilly, the structure of “Andor’s” second season helped build toward Mothma’s moment with the speech. During the season’s first three-episode arc, audiences see Mothma, wife and mother, navigating deeply personal moments and the strains in her relationships at her daughter Leida’s (Bronte Carmichael) traditional, extravagant, marathon wedding in her homeland.
“The most unexpected, dramatic, sometimes messy things happen at weddings,” she says, pointing to the conversation Mothma has with Leida just before the wedding ceremony about her mother at her own wedding. “It felt deeply personal … Mon Mothma, in that very moment, she’s just opened herself completely and Leida just kind of sticks the knife in. So she has to button herself back up, figuratively put the mask back on, and go back outside … There’s no tricks. It’s really about relationship. It was really special.”
The next arc, which spans from Episodes 4 to 6, shows Senator Mothma in action as she tries to build a coalition to fight problematic policy as well as maintain her mask while unexpectedly having to interact with Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), a man who represents everything she is fighting against.
“I could certainly feel it in every fiber of my body that she really wants to take him down,” says O’Reilly of Mothma’s mindset during their exchange. “It’s all she wants, but she can’t. She must stand there and spar a tiny bit, but in the end, she has to swallow what he’s serving because of the power he wields. And if she is exposed there, it’s all for nothing.”
She explains that “there is great danger” for Mothma as she manages the many masks she has to live behind while in the public eye.
“She’s stuck, but I think what the speech reveals in Episode 9 was that all of that was worth it,” O’Reilly says. “You could see what she had been holding all that time. You can feel it fly from her body.”
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Mothma is a character O’Reilly has been playing on and off in various “Star Wars” installments for 20 years. Originally cast to play the younger version of the Rebellion leader portrayed by Caroline Blakiston in the 1983 film “Return of the Jedi,” O’Reilly first stepped into the galaxy far, far away for 2005’s prequel film “Revenge of the Sith” — though most of her scenes landed on the cutting room floor. She was then brought back to reprise the character in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” the 2016 spinoff film that takes place directly after the events of “Andor.” She’s since portrayed the character in “Ahsoka” as well as the animated “Star Wars Rebels” (the latter of which is set during the same years as “Andor”).
“I could never have expected that 20 years later I would be here playing the most fleshed out, dexterous, rich, enriched version of this woman,” says O’Reilly.
In addition to Gilroy and his writing team, O’Reilly credits “Andor’s” hair and makeup designer Emma Scott and costume designer Michael Wilkinson for helping bring Mothma to life, especially this season. With Mothma being someone that is very deliberate in her wardrobe, O’Reilly says Wilkinson has “revealed character within the armor she chooses to wear each day.”
While Blakiston’s Mothma did not have much screen time, O’Reilly says what audiences do see is “a woman who has a weight, a gravitas, but also who has a deep empathy” and, just as significantly, was a female leader of a rebellion in a movie filmed in the 1980s. And she has always understood Mothma to be deeply socially conscious — whether that was what drove her to join the Galactic Senate or if it was her work representing people for so many years that awakened her social consciousness.
“I don’t know which way that happened, but I definitely feel that in her bones,” O’Reilly says. “I think the window into her history, into that orthodox culture that she has grown up in, probably helps you see what motivated that drive.”
And in the two seasons of “Andor,” O’Reilly — as well as the audience — has finally been able to see a fuller picture of Mothma and her backstory, as well as some of the pain the character endured to become the Rebel Alliance leader “Star Wars” fans know.
“To have had the opportunity to come back and to really play, discover, and put flesh and blood and sinew and heartbeat into this woman, to really fill her out,” O’Reilly says. “She feels so beautifully human and complicated, and it’s really a version of her that I could have only hoped for.”
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