‘Andor’ star Genevieve O’Reilly explains Mon Mothma’s wild dancing

Mon Mothma? More like Mon Mosh-ma.

In episode 3 of Andor’s second season, our favorite rebel leader and senator, Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), gets her galactic groove on. Usually tightly coiled and wearing a mask of serenity, Mon is hardly the type we expect to see let loose on the dance floor.

But after a disastrous wedding, which includes Mon’s own daughter expressing her disdain for her and the realization that former childhood friend, Tay Kolma (Ben Miles), is a problem that Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) needs to “deal” with, she throws her own mental breakdown into the dance.

Downing drinks, Mon loses herself in the crowd, trying to wrestle with the fact that while she didn’t order Tay’s death, she did tell Luthen about her former friend’s attempted blackmail and silently condoned his murder.

“It was everything,” O’Reilly says of finally getting to drop Mon’s mask for a moment. “It’s such a special moment. It’s a crescendo of so much — to get to relieve Mon from the structure of the column that she is.”

However, O’Reilly cautions against viewers taking it as a moment of abandon rather than one of distress. “Yes, it’s this extraordinary, wild, free dance movement,” she adds. “But it’s also because she’s writhing in pain because of what she’s just done. She’s just tacitly agreed to have her friend murdered, so she’s dancing to stop herself from screaming.”

“It’s so clever how, by the dance, you really get to see the chaos that’s inside her head,” she concludes.

If you’re curious what song the crowd was dancing to, it was the same as what we hear on screen, “Niamos!” written by composer Nicholas Britell. Audiences heard it a few times in the first season. “This is the big, galactic hit version,” O’Reilly says. “It’s like at any wedding, all those kids are waiting for the DJ to come in to get up on the dance floor. Gosh, we had so much fun that day.”

O’Reilly might have had a blast, but Mon Mothma most decidedly is not. This incident with Tay Kolma and his inevitable fate have fully shattered any last illusions she might have held about the cost of rebellion.

“Luthen’s really called her out on any romantic notion of rebellion,” she notes. “We’re all dispensable. It all comes with a cost, and Tay is a really dangerous threat to them at that moment. He knows so much about her.”

“He was instrumental in everything that happened in season 1,” she says of Tay. “All of those economic decisions to allow for the funding of this rebellion — he was such an intricate part of that. Now, it seems he’s kneeling at the altar of false idols with Sculdun (Richard Dillane). He sees all that gold and he wants a taste of it, and there’s not really a place for that gold within rebellion.”

Andor season 2 drops new episodes Tuesdays on Disney+.