Stellan Skarsgård and Elizabeth Dulau of Andor deconstruct Luten and Klea
The actors spoke to StarWars.com about their characters' motivations and thinking in the latest Andor story arc.
Spoiler alert: This article discusses plot details and twists from key episodes in the second season ofAndor.
Their agents “have friends everywhere,” but it is the complex connection between Luthen Rael and Kleya Marki that helps provide vital information to the Rebels.
After one of Luten's longtime ISB agents, Lonni-Jung, places an emergency call, things start to go downhill rapidly for Luten and Clay in Episode Ten of Andor. After years of living a double life, secretly working against the Empire and publicly running the gallery on Coruscant, "Make It Stop" provides backstory on Luten and Kleia's relationship, interspersed with Kleia's heartbreaking actions after Luthen makes the ultimate sacrifice to escape Imperial interrogation.
Throughout both seasonsAndor Luten was shown as a cunning and at times ruthless rebel rebel willing to risk his life and the lives of others for the larger goal of overthrowing the Empire. But Skarsgård was never shocked by his character's behavior.
“No, no, not at all,” says Skarsgård. "I have to play the character as [someone who] believes in revolution." But Skarsgård also appreciates moments in the series where his character shows moments of empathy, such as when Luten visits Bix at his secret home on Coruscant.“Even if you play a tough guy like Luten,” notes Skarsgård, “he doesn’t have to be tough all the time. And if he doesn’t have sympathy, then he has nothing to do in the revolution, because the cause of the revolution is sympathy.”
The death of Luten in the series did not come as a surprise to the actor. "I don't think anyone in that situation thinks they're going to survive," Skarsgård notes. And flashbacks showing Luten as an Imperial soldier rescuing young Clay, whose home world is being devastated, show that he likely never would have gotten this far without her as his partner.
“In these flashbacks, he kind of gives her the education of a revolutionary,” says Skarsgård. “Because he is an old military man, he knows these things. But she is the one who is fierce. She's twice as cool as him, and you see it in the way Elizabeth Dulau plays her as an adult."
Clea's character plays a much larger role in the second season of Andor, thanks in part to Elizabeth Dulau's brilliant performance in the first season. Elizabeth looked forward to learning more about her character with the audience. “You have no idea who she is in the first season,” Dulau notes. “She is so shrouded in mystery. And I think mysterious characters are always attractive. It was incredibly nice to visit her again and get answers to the question of who she is.”
Dulau describes Kleya as a character who will fight against the Empire until his death. And the flashback sequences helped reveal her character's motivations. “Her rebellion is revenge,” she says. She thought about the family Clay had lost and how that played into her traumatic past. “That’s what fuels it.This is what gives her the fire to continue moving forward and become a formidable opponent of the Empire."
It was important to show the complex and conflicting feelings that Clea had for Lutene as she grew older. “What was key to me in developing their relationship was that it wasn’t a father-daughter relationship,” Dulau says. “This is not the tender, heart-warming kind.”
The other side of this coin is the devotion to each other that the couple has developed over the years. “He spends every day after [their meeting] effectively protecting her,” Dulau says. “And she protects him, and it becomes their life. They are so dependent on each other.”
Cleia spent most of the first season of Andora in the background, which perfectly matched the image that the actress created for her. “She cultivated this image because she wanted people to underestimate her,” she says. “Her strength is that she is completely underestimated and ignored. I think that's what we all do. We all kind of code switch and become different versions of ourselves in different situations.”
The episode "What a Party Night" shows the intense dance that Clay forces on ISB officer and rebel spy Lonnie during a party thrown by Chandrilan's banker Davo Skuldun, in which she struggles to remove the recording device from under the nose of ISB Director Orson Krennic. This season, Clay works with many tools, from a brooch that acts as a master key to key cards that she hands over to operatives. But the hardest thing to master in Dulau was also the most important: Kleya's hidden radio.To convey the comfort and ease Klee needs when operating the radio she uses to communicate with operatives and spy on the Imperials, Dulau compared the action to driving a car, where so many of the physical movements of pressing your foot on the gas pedal or turning the steering wheel become instinctive over time.
“This radio is like Kleya’s baby,” says Dulau. “She put it together piece by piece over several years. She knows him inside and out, inside and out. And [director Ariel Kleiman] wanted to capture some of that experience. He wanted Clay's hands to dance on that radio as if she could do it with her eyes closed."
As the Imperials close in on Luten and Klea, Skarsgård and Dulau agree that Klea has a key role in ensuring everything doesn't fall apart immediately. “She doesn’t move an inch,” notes Skarsgård. “And my character kind of starts to wobble a little bit. It becomes more solid." From Kleia's point of view, Dulau sees the panic her heroine felt after years of seeing only power from Luten. “When Clea sees Luten hesitating a little, it actually scares her. This changes her idea of who they are to each other. But Kleya never likes to show fear. I think her immediate coping mechanism, her immediate defense mechanism, is to go into anger."
She describes Kleia's infiltration of the hospital to end Luten's life and save him - and his secrets - from Imperial torture as a human-sized game of Mousetrap, with Kleya as the mouse and Luten as the cheese.Clay barely speaks in these scenes, in which every move was technical and carefully rehearsed to be precise.
The pair's final moments together resemble echoes of their first, as Luten tells Klee to bottle up and store the hatred she feels for the Empire until she knows what to do with it. “And I think what helps Klea do what she needs to do in this moment is all the hatred she has for him,” Dulau says. “She's been plugging it up for 17 years.”
But along with the hatred there is a tension from the love that she also suppressed for Luten. “And it just breaks through,” she continues. “It’s all this love that she feels for him that screams at her in that moment not to do this. But it is through all this love that she must keep pushing to do it. She doesn't want to leave him there on that bed, but she has to tell herself that she has to run because she has to deliver this message back to Yavin. She shouldn't get caught.”
At the end of her journey on Andor, Dulau notes what an impactful experience the series was for her early in her career. “I told [Stellan] I’ll never forget how we wandered around a galaxy far, far away with Stellan Skarsgård. All my life, no matter what job I take, I will never forget this.”