The Secrets of Gorman, Mina-Rau and More: Creating the Worlds of Andor, Season 2 (Part 2)
Feb 08, 2026
Yavin is all grown up.
Throughout the second season of Andora we watched as Yavin 4 transformed from a deserted jungle into a refuge, and then into the central headquarters of the nascent Alliance rebels. “Essentially, by the end of Andora, Yavin should feel the same way it did in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” notes Mohen Leo, ILM's visual effects supervisor. The finale of season two—all directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios and written by Tom Bissell—takes us days away from the events of the 2016 anthology film.
“In many ways, Yavin was both the easiest and hardest part of season two,” says Hull, referring to the new Yavin set built at Longcross Studios in England. “On the one hand, it exists in canon, we have a blueprint for what Yavin is, and on the other hand, for me, the challenge was that it was already designed, and our sets had to fit seamlessly into our series... You can walk into these sets and they very quickly become a museum. We've always said that we wanted to capture the nostalgia of the original films, but with the same grit that we had in Rogue One. It was very important to us to give people a lot of options for action.Everything really comes alive and makes sense when there's dynamic movement, when sparks are flying, when it looks like they're building something, when it feels like they're working together and people are working on these ships."
Hull adds that even during the year-long gap between the third and fourth story arcs of the season, there were changes in the operation of the Yavin base, from a "looser" atmosphere to a more "militaristic" tone. There's a slight contrast, however, in the relative informality of Cassian's (Diego Luna) makeshift abode on the outskirts of the base, in the jungle. “It's like a college dorm,” says creator and executive producer Tony Gilroy of the story's character dynamics. “K-2SO [Alan Tudyk] lives there and Melshi [Duncan Pow] lives there, it's kind of a mess, they're playing cards. And they drink too much.”
“Flying away into the world ofRogue One.”
In particular, the final part of the second season of Andora is full of “very concentrated moments,” as Gilroy calls them, each of which leads up to the events of Rogue One. This is especially evident in the final montage of Episode 12, where Cassian walks from his jungle home through the Rebel base to board his U-wing. The montage includes moments that bring all of the characters of Andor together, placing them in their final context.The world of the story of Andor is seamlessly woven into an emotionally rich sequence.
For the Andora design team, “the language of the series” was paramount in “how we approach each design,” as Hull explains. “We try to be as close to our characters and heroes as possible, as required by Tony's script. [We follow Cassian] through the village, triggering parts of this montage at the right point along the way, before getting to the U-wing, saying goodbye to the temple and essentially flying off into Rogue One. It seemed like a really important task that needed to be accomplished.”
“I think that when creating all these locations for Star Wars, you always have to combine two factors: firstly, working closely with the production team, with the set designers and props people, to make sure that everything that goes into the frame is physically real, and that helps us a lot,” concludes Leo. “And at the same time, we need to determine where it makes sense to use digital technologies. For example, with the hangars, the art department did a wonderful job creating everything at ground level, but ceilings or superstructures above make much more sense for us.”As with the final edit, many of Andor's departments worked together to bring a cohesive and believable galaxy to the screen.
Yavin becomes base camp.
Andor's third round of episodes - each directed by Janus Metz from a script by Dan Gilroy - takes us back toGhorman,Coruscant, as well as the previously anonymous jungle world that turns out to be Yavin 4. This is the main locationThe Rebel Alliance headquarterswas first shown inthe film Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), and now we see the early days of Yavin as a base. Elements of this location have already been used twice as large-scale sets for the films A New Hope and Rogue One: A Story Star Wars (2016).
Because Palmo's set for Gorman took up most, if not all, of the Lucasfilm set at Pinewood Studios, Longcross Studios in Surrey was used to create some elements of the Yavin Temple and surrounding area. “The advantage was that we had space to go straight out to the slide area, use it as a sort of landing pad, go up into the village, and then go deeper into the jungle,” explains production designer Luke Hull. “This way, everything was connected if we needed to shoot directly in camera.We had other decorations scattered throughout the forest. We also had two film sets at Longcross that we were constantly redoing.”
ILM visual effects supervisor Mohen Leo adds, “When we first see the rebel base in episode seven, it's still under construction. And this is an important plot point...to quickly show that the rebels are still in the process of settling. So we're working on these scenes with [visual effects house] Scanline, and they did a really good job with the aerial photography to show that there's deforestation going on there. They are trying to clear part of the jungle to build an airfield. Part of the airfield is still under construction, and there are fewer ships and people."
How to find Coruscant in Spain
Starting in the 1980s, Spain appeared in several Lucasfilm films, including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (1992-96) and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002). Andor returned to the Iberian Peninsula not only to film the mountain ranges of Chadrila, but also large parts of Coruscant. The famous City of Arts and Sciences complex in Valencia was used to film a number of locations inSenate District of the planet.
“There's an architect named Santiago Calatrava, who has built a lot of incredibly extravagant and crazy buildings all over the world,” explains Andorcreator and executive producer Tony Gilroy.“And he built this incredible complex, an entertainment complex in Valencia. We need real things that are around us. And then we can expand the scenery and complete something. But we use reality, everything is real from the very beginning.”
“It’s a huge complex of museums and event spaces,” says Leo. “It’s just fantastic, because sometimes there are places where only one angle works, and... we have to shoot in that direction.” But here in Valencia, you could just walk around every corner and it looked like Coruscant. We shot so much and it fit perfectly into our approach of trying to make everything as realistic as possible, using locations and then enhancing and adding to them. So this place in particular looked very prestigious and formal, so much so that one could believe that these could be government offices.”
Make the Senate familiar, but at the same time different.
The City of Arts and Sciences, home to many cultural institutions and scenic walkways, became the setting for much of the Imperial Senate's activities. As Hull explains, one of the main priorities for the second season of Andor was determining how best to portray the Senate, a location firmly established in the Star Warsprequel trilogy.Starting with the basic architectural structure of the earlier films, the team atAndoramade certain changes to reflect the regime change.
“Modernizing might not be the right word here,” says Hull, “but we kind of fit it into the aesthetic structure of our series. And we have always been firmly convinced that this requires a location of the appropriate scale to have a basis. This is exactly what Valencia provided us with. This helped us plan the creation of the Senate buildings based on our location, which formed the square directly in front of them. We worked with Maughan and [ILM visual effects producer] TJ [Falls] from the beginning to come up with a plan for what it would look like... Then from there we built the whole path from the plaza to the Senate to the capsule of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), using a combination of studio sets and scenery created on location.”
A significant portion of the actual Senate chamber was created using computer graphics by ILM. As TJ Falls explains, “We get to explore the different alien races... and the people who are involved in creating the style and look. This provides the perfect opportunity to showcase Coruscant's high society.The biggest challenge is to shoot so many elements and put them together to get these shots?” The ILM team filmed many separate live-action shots to ultimately combine them into a realistic and believable Senate chamber.
A familiar planet surrounded by... potatoes?
In the second story arc of the second season of the series Andor - all episodes directed by Ariel Kleiman from a script by Beau Wilimon - Wilmon Paak is sent to help the rebel squad led by Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). Their current hideout is a familiar place: the grassy bunkers of D'Qar, a planet surrounded by asteroids first shown as a resistance base in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and later in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017). The same real-life location in England was used for filming - the World War II Royal Air Force base known as Greenham Common.
“It’s too early to talk about the complete arrangement of the base. This is not a rebel base yet,” notes ILM visual effects producer TJ Falls. “This is just a place where a group of people set up camp and caused a real massacre. This is the same planet that we see in the films, but long before the events of those films.It just so happened that this is where Seuss was drawn, after which he packed his things and left.”
To create images of D'Qar and its asteroid belt in space in Andor, the same people from ILM were used to create similar elements for The Last Jedi. As visual effects supervisor Scott Pritchard explains, a special tribute to ILM's earlier work on Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) was developed. “We came up with the idea of paying homage to the original ILM modelers, and in particular the asteroid chase scene where they used potatoes for some of the background asteroids when shooting the miniatures. So our environment supervisor, Guy Williams, took some potatoes, shot some footage and made CG versions of them. Several potatoes can be seen in the asteroid field around D'Qar."
Does this jungle look familiar to you?
Stole TIE Avenger prototype from the test site Sienar Fleet Systems ,Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) (barely) takes the ship to the meeting point in the dense jungle. However, his partner goes missing, and in a twist of fate, Cassian is captured by a rival group of rebels, a cell that doesn't know Andor, and ends up trapped on this unknown planet. Only after an attack on a group of Yavin Dudar does Cassian manage to escape on his ship, and in the wide shot showing the flying away Avenger, we see a familiar group of Massasi temples. This is Yavin 4.These structures first appeared in the film Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) and were last seen in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), but how The Rebel Alliance managed to create a secret base there remains a mystery a mystery.
“The origins of Yavin are controversial,” says Gilroy, referring to the entireStar Warscanon. “You spend two episodes there and only realize after [Cassian] escapes that the jungle he was in... is raw Yavin. This is wild Yavin."
Unusually for a TIE fighter , Hull's art department built a full-scale, practical model of the ship for use during on-set filming. “The ship itself had to serve many functions, so it was obvious from the beginning that we should build a full model with interior and exterior space,” explains the production designer. The structure is “disassembled into three parts, transported and delivered to the Yavin clearing.” Leo adds: “It's one of those things you don't usually see on a real set.You can actually go inside and sit in the booth.”
They planted the field and then moved it.
Mina Rau, a new planet for Star Wars audiences, has become home (and refuge) for Cassian, Bixa Caleen (Adria Arjona), Brasso (Joplin Sibtain), Wilmon Paak (Muhannad Bhayer) and, of course, the droid B2EMO. “I wanted to bring some sunshine into the series, bright sunshine,” Gilroy says of the world's creative spark, which also served as an answer to the underlying question of resources in the galaxy. “Where does all the food for Coruscant come from? They've been kicked out of a community that they really care about, and they found a new place where it's sunny and beautiful, and now it's going to be taken away from them."
Like Ferrix, it is a world with close communal ties, built on a local economy that requires hard work. As Luke Hull notes: "The entire planet was terraformed to grow one type of crop to feed the Empire... [Whether] people are on the run or born there, they all live in communes of sorts and are given a certain plot of land to farm... but the grain is transported off-planet."
Hull was responsible for selecting the variety of crops to grow on Mina Rau, eventually settling on an ancient variety of rye that could be sown in England. “Somehow we found a farmer and convinced him to grow rye instead of wheat in his field that year,” explains the production designer. “Rich Hill, the location manager, found a very nice field located near the studio. It gave us great...horizontal lines because obviously the field had to look huge.We had to expand all this into post-production.”
The production team built a complete set for the mobile home and various equipment in a rye field located near the small village of Watlington in Oxfordshire. However, before principal photography began in the summer of 2023, a SAG-AFTRA union strike began. This did not stop the field from further expanding. The set department had to improvise by cutting sections of grain from the field and storing them on a soundstage at Pinewood Studios. Various sets were then moved as scenes were only completed during the final week of filming in early 2024.
Star Warsat home...
An important aspect of the narrative of Andor is the elements of everyday domestic life. We've seen hints of this in previous stories, such as the dinner scenes in A New Hope or href="https://www.starwars.com/films/star-wars-episode-i-the-phantom-menace">Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), but Andor integrates these mundane yet authentic qualities on a more complex scale. We've seen Coruscant many times before, but this series takes us into residential buildings, shops and office spaces.The second episode shows another such location: Dedra Meero's luxurious but austere apartment in a high-rise building, which she now shares with herself. href="https://www.starwars.com/databank/syril-karn">Cyril Karn (Kyle Soller).
“Tony's scripts are so different from anything that has been done in Star Wars before,” explains set designer Rebecca Alleway. “The opportunity to develop the story, to create the characters, their worlds, the houses they lived in... I remember how excited I was when I designed my first kitchen forStar Wars... It was such a big challenge. We always go back to what Star Wars is about, looking at all the original references and then building on the characters... That meant we just had to get creative and find new ways to make these sets cluttered, realistic and expressive, but not in the usual sense."
Property specialist Ben Wilkinson adds that home economics specialists Catherine Tidy and Olivia Somari had their hands full preparing the various dishes needed for the season, including the "fondue, but with some weird jelly bug" that Cyril's mother eats, Eady Karn (Catherine Hunter), during his awkward visit to the apartment.
Traditional Scottish wedding
Because Andor's first season was filmed during a global pandemic, there was no extensive location filming outside of the UK. The situation changed with the second season.Chandrila has existed in the Star Wars canon for many decades as the homeworld of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), but has never before been visually depicted in a cinematic work. “You just go on a journey to imagine where Mon Mothma and the Chandrilans come from,” says executive producer Sanne Wohlenberg. “You're always looking for something new and fresh in the world of Star Wars.”
Mothma Estate is located in a mountainous region. The Montserrat mountain range northwest of Barcelona, Spain, with its characteristic spiky formations, was eventually chosen as the actual filming location. The pre-wedding ceremonial walk of Leidas of Mothma (Bronte Carmichael) and Stekan of Skuldun (Finlay Glasgow) were filmed there, and various interiors of the estate were created in Pinewood studio. “It’s just the perfectStar Warslandscape,” comments Hull. “These are soft rocks that seem unreal or not very common in the world.”
When designing the estate, Hull and the art department explored the unusual combination of historic Japanese stone castles and the minimalist, nature-infused architecture of Scandinavia. In the ballroom, where the unforgettable wedding dance takes place, the floor was paved with a stone with a unique celestial map. “I've always thought that the great thing about the Chandrilans was their pride in their place in the universe,” Hull notes. “So the idea was for the floor to be like a star map of their position in the galaxy, which we made a slightly smaller version on Coruscant [at the Chandrilan embassy]. The dance was, I think, the highlight for Tony and everyone else.This ballroom becomes more of an arena for many people to interact.”
When designing the wedding, Alleway was guided by her previous work for the Chandrilan embassy in the first season. “Ikebana is the Japanese art of flower arranging,” she explains. “So I knew that if Mon made flowers for her daughter’s wedding, it would be like ikebana at the embassy. That’s why I completely immersed myself in this art.”
As Wohlenberg summarizes, being able to create aspects of Chandrilan culture and tradition can mean a lot of interesting surprises and insight into the characters' emotions. “The way you clink glasses during the performance, the way you applaud, the way [they do] all these things and the way they dance is what makes it a little alien,” she says. "I think the big surprise that Tony incredibly and so beautifully [presented] for Mon Mothma's journey is that the very elegant and civilized Chandrilans actually let their hair down when it comes to marriage. It was a whole world up for grabs, and I think we took it."
The first part of the article is available by link.