‘Andor’ star Kyle Soller reacts to Syril’s fate in explosive episode 8

No more space cereal for Sryil.

Andor’s tightly-wound oddball with serious mommy issues finally met his end on episode 8 of the Star Wars series’ second season, as Syril Karn was on the receiving end of a blaster bolt during the massacre of Ghorman. And in true Syril fashion, he went down with one last big blow to the ego.

The downward slide began when Kyle Soller’s Syril found out about the mining equipment on Ghorman and realized he had been lied to by girlfriend Dedra (Denise Gough) about the Empire’s real interest in the planet. He stormed into her office, demanding to know the truth — choking her while saying, “If you tell me it’s a rumor I will throw you out that window.”

After being told the real reason for the Ghorman occupation, Syril walked out of the ISB offices in a daze… until he saw the man he so doggedly (and unsuccessfully) pursued that led to his downfall — Cassian Andor.

Syril tussled with Diego Luna’s Andor in an epic fight before finally getting his blaster trained on the man who had tormented him from afar, only to have Cassian ask, “Who are you?” A stunned Syril slowly dropped his blaster and then was shot to death himself by Ghorman resistance leader Carro Rylanz (Richard Sammel).

It was a sad and appropriately unheroic death for a character who never could seem to catch a break. “It’s so elementally Greek and dramatic that the thing that you’ve based your life on doesn’t even recognize you,” Andor creator Tony Gilroy tells Entertainment Weekly. “Everything that he’s constructed for himself doesn’t even have any awareness of him. I think he’s just stunned. He can’t even breathe at that point. There’s the guy that ruined my life that I was chasing for four years, and I’ll be like this raccoon in a relentless fight, and I’ll be able to kill him. And then, oh my God, he doesn’t even know who I am! It seemed like the absolute essential summation of poor Syril’s life.”

Yet sad sack Syril somehow became a fan favorite… due in no small part to his unique relationships with both his girlfriend and his mother Eedy (Kathryn Hunter). Entertainment Weekly spoke to Kyle Soller to get the inside scoop on the life and death of Syril Karn.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:  First off, how and when did you get the news of Syril’s untimely demise?

KYLE SOLLER: That was during that conversation with [showrunner Tony Gilroy] when he was mapping out the arc and telling me how Syril was going to go undercover and be used by Dedra and the whole ISB plans, and then ultimately getting mixed into the Ghorman community. And that just before you think things might change for Sryil, there he is! He sees Cassian, and I was just like, “Oh my God, man, this is so intense” — just even listening to it, because it all happens within the space of five, 10 minutes for Sryil.

It’s so intense. And then all of that betrayal that he’s feeling from Dedra and from the Empire is then funneled into seeing the guy that he blames for everything that has ever gone wrong in his life. And he just throws out all of his aggression onto Cassian.

And then the ultimate last bit of disappointment is that Cassian says, “Who are you?” It’s just brutal. Because he has maybe delusions of grandeur, but Syril believes he is doing the right thing in his own little sliver of the Empire, which is so disconnected from the higher echelons, and he kind of is doing the right thing. He thinks he’s there to trap outside agitators and he’s being a good cop, but he feels like he makes an impact.

And for this guy, of course, he doesn’t. For Cassian, he doesn’t make an impact at all. Cassian barely sees his face. But for the years that Syril has obsessed and obsessed and poured his ambition and aggression into disappointment, into this kind of totem of Cassian, for him to be met with that brutality at the end was like, I felt for the guy, man.

I did, too. What makes it even more effective is the way you drop the blaster a little bit after the “Who are you?” line. What’s going through his mind when he lowers that blaster? It’s almost like he’s in a daze or something.

I think after everything that Syril has experienced in episode 8 — which is massive, it’s mind-blowing, it’s earth-shattering — the whole veil has been lifted. And then his sort of ultimate obsession, being Cassian, not validating him, I think he’s completely in shock.

And then at that point I thought, “Well, what if he didn’t then get blasted? What would happen?” I figured, “Oh, he’d just wander away. He’d probably just wander away.” I mean, those three words just completely diffuse Syril, and he feels like a no one, like a nobody. He hasn’t made a difference. Everything has been a lie. I thought maybe he’d go find a mountain somewhere just to kind of make clothes or something. I don’t think that he would swap sides. I don’t think he would stay doing what he was doing. I mean, yeah, it’s really an unknown.

I always assumed when I first saw this guy in season 1 that this was a person with a very strict code, and once he realizes the people he’s fighting for don’t share that same code, he is going to end up flipping sides. And the fact that that doesn’t happen, and if he doesn’t get killed he is just going to wander off is so much more intriguing.

Yeah, I really do think by that point that he realizes having lived among the Ghormans and been changed by them and seeing both sides really doing such trauma and causing so much pain for each other, I think he’s disillusioned with the entire way the system works. It’s also leaving a cult, that Empire. He grew up desperately wanting to be a part of it. In season 1, he’s got these little figurines in his room that I imagined he would just be playing with and looking at as a kid and a teenager. And so I think he would just want to get far away from that stuff as possible.

What was filming your death scene like?

Oh, it was really intense, man. We were working really hard and it was really cold. I think it was February or something, and we were going through something like two weeks doing that whole plaza sequence, and the fight scene as well. I think we had maybe three days for the fight, which was not enough time for a fight like that. I mean, it was really ambitious, that fight. And I remember it just being really hard, but really good.

The stunts team were absolutely incredible, and every level of production on the second season, everybody just turned it up to 11. I think what they accomplished in that scene in the death and everything, it was powerful. We’d been so together for two weeks, just so tightly wound trying to create this plaza riot sequence, and it was heavy, man. It was very emotional. Janus Metz was directing, and he comes from a documentary background and started doing documentaries about the war in Afghanistan. It was very heavy.

Speaking of heavy, I don’t want to sleep on the scene you and Denise have in that episode when you go into her office and you’re choking her and saying you’re going to throw her out a window, because that was super intense. Tell me about you two finding that dance and filming that scene.

Yeah, it was a dance. I was a bit worried about the aggressiveness of it and was supported on all angles about doing it that way. I think it’s effective. It’s unexpected, and it shows something I’ve been thinking about, which is that one of the most unexpected things about Syril that he has revealed about himself is a quiet physical strength actually — in terms of confrontation and in terms of attack and in terms of courage. Denise is a beautiful actress and we know how to work together really well, and feel safe together. And so that was really negotiated in a very careful way, but that was a pretty tense day.

Did you get to steal any good props or clothing items or anything from set?

If I had, I would not be here right now. I would be in some Star Wars prison very far away. Somebody on the crew did that on the first season. They made away with a payment card or token or something that was just a prop that you wouldn’t see or whatever, and that guy was found within 20 minutes. Gone.

Now that it’s all done, do you have a favorite memory or day on set for Andor?

There’s so many, dude. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s true. I do look back on that riot sequence, and even though it was very difficult, it felt like being part of something at that scale where everybody was working so hard at such high quality felt really exciting. I hadn’t done a scene like that before.

And it also marries up with a scene in season 1 when Syril is trying to capture Cassian on Ferrix and fails. That was sort of my favorite bit of season 1 — not because they’re both action sequences, but because there’s a real intimacy vulnerability moment within all of the chaos. And that juxtaposition always intrigues me, and it was another day where everything kind of went right, even though it looks like everything’s going wrong.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.