Why ‘Andor’ diverged from canon with Mon Mothma’s epic Senate speech

“The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine.”

With those resounding words, Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) gives up any pretension of allegiance to the Empire and declares herself a member of the Rebellion.

Episode 9 of Andor season 2 delivers a highly anticipated moment to the screen, one that both audiences and O’Reilly, who has been portraying Mon Mothma for 20 years now, have been waiting for. After the Ghorman massacre, Mon feels that she can no longer stay silent about the atrocities of the Empire.

She decides, along with Bail Organa (Benjamin Bratt), that it’s time to publicly decry the Empire and their actions on the floor of the Senate. They make a plan, in which Bail will yield the floor to her and his team will extract her immediately after.

Mon prepares her speech, even shutting out her assistant Erskin Semaj (Pierro Niel-Mee) when she discovers that he’s been reporting her every move to Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) for the last two years.

“She’s not risking anything,” O’Reilly explains of Mon’s refusal to hear Erskin’s apologies and excuses. “She knows that now is the time to use her one weapon, which is her voice, and she must use it and be as impactful as possible. She is ruthless in that moment, in the name of the Rebellion.”

Then, she delivers a historic speech. “Fellow senators, friends, colleagues, allies, adversaries, I stand before you this morning with a heavy heart,” she says. “I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous.”

“The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil,” she continues. “When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped form our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman plaza. What took place yesterday, what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide. Yes, genocide. And that truth has been exiled from this chamber. And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we helped create, the monster who will come for us all soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine.”

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For O’Reilly, it was the realization of two decades of work portraying this character. “It was everything I was hoping for,” she says. “That’s like the best gift you can get as an actor. She speaks to how important the Senate is to her. You can see that it’s like her church. She reveals so much and then she calls out some really brutal truths.”

“That was everything I really wanted to do,” she adds. “I knew that that would be important to fans. I knew it was also really important to me for her. That’s the fulcrum of who Mon Mothma is right there. And so I got to stand up for her in that moment. That was really important to me, and I hope it means something to people because it felt really great to be able to give her that voice.”

However, Star Wars fans may note that this speech diverges somewhat from the canon that was established in the animated series Rebels. In season 3 episode “Secret Cargo,” Mon makes a speech broadcast across the galaxy from within a ship as she is transported to Yavin by Gold Squadron.

Andor creator Tony Gilroy explains that he and writer Dan Gilroy felt constrained by having to adhere to the speech she delivers there (and weren’t all that interested in parroting someone else’s writing). “We are hijacking canon,” Tony Gilroy admits. “In canon, she’s rescued by the Gold Squadron and the speech that they gave in the cartoon, which was a canonical show, [is on that ship]. And Danny’s like, ‘Do I have to stick to this f–ing speech?'”

As it turns out, they figured out a way where he didn’t have to, allowing them to eat their rebel cake and have it too. Cassian (Diego Luna) would rescue Mon from the Senate, evading Bail’s corrupted squadron, and he would deliver her to the safe house. But she would remain there, awaiting Luthen’s arranged transport with Gold Squadron, and she would make another speech broadcast to the entire galaxy once safely on her way to Yavin.

“In a really sneaky way, we’re minimizing what they did in Star Wars Rebels, but we’re keeping it consistent,” Gilroy notes. “We’re just saying you don’t really know the whole story of what happened.” 

At first, the whole story was told a bit differently. Mon’ speech was fragmented, pieces of it cut between a flurry of action scenes, depicting Bail’s corrupted Gold Squadron, Cassian’s entry to the Senate, and the Empire’s frantic attempts to shut Mon down.

But O’Reilly wanted Mon to get the full meal of a moment here. “Tony came into my trailer, and I said, ‘It’s just extraordinary,'” she recounts. “And he just sat there and went, ‘You want me to write the whole speech, don’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, please, please, I would love that. Write the whole speech’.”

“Within a day or two, he came with that whole speech,” she continues. “He gave it to me, the idea being that I would learn it and then they would just do those moments. Then, I went to the director, and the director was like, ‘Yeah, let’s film the whole speech.’ It was such a huge thing to me to give that whole speech. It feels really special.”

In addition to that monumental speech, Mon Mothma also gets a highly symbolic moment of her public jump to the Rebellion — as she and Cassian are attempting to escape the Senate, she drops her Senate robe in response to a moment of brutal violence. She leaves it there, instead donning Cassian’s jacket as camouflage.

O’Reilly worked with the Andor team and costume designer Michael Wilkinson to find the perfect moment for that sartorial gesture. “We knew that that Cassian had to give her his coat because he has to disguise her to leave the building,” she explains. “It wasn’t scripted where it happened, but I remember us really workshopping that. Where does it mean the most?”

“Do you do it when the pod retracts before you leave?” she continues. “Because once she leaves that Senate pod, she’s got a target on her back, but could she be more effective getting through the building to escape with that on? Because there is respect given to that robe. Then, there’s that really violent moment in that lobby, and she’s faced with that wall of undeniable aggression and rebellion. It’s deeply shocking to her. That is the most instinctive, vulnerable moment to drop everything in order to escape that.”

To O’Reilly, though the speech is far more visible and pointed, dropping that robe to the ground is Mon’s true moment of revolt. “She has been working for the Rebellion deeply and intrinsically, and she’s been vital to the Rebellion,” she reflects. “But that is the moment that she crosses that rubicon and she crosses it with Cassian. That felt beautiful, that it is with him, given where we go in Rogue One. But it’s that there’s no turning back at that point. There is no going back.”