Exclusive Interview
Long Love the Empire: Inside Syril & Dedra’s ‘Andor’ Romance With Kyle Soller and Denise Gough
[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Andor Season 2.]
The wait for Andor’s second season gave fans plenty of time to speculate. And for over two and a half years, they did just that. Before the first episode premiered, they’d taken educated (and ultimately, correct) guesses at several major plot points, including Cassian (Diego Luna) ending up on Yavin before it was a rebel base, Syril (Kyle Soller) spending part of his Season 2 arc on Ghorman, and Krennic’s (Ben Mendelsohn) then-possible, now-iconic return. However, in all of that hypothesizing, few — if any — could have predicted Syril and Dedra’s (Denise Gough) relationship. Fewer still could’ve predicted such a relationship would be… healthy? Almost healthy?
Now that Season 2 has come to a close, we’re looking back at one of the weirdest romances in Star Wars to argue that while we don’t support the Empire, we did find ourselves rooting for whatever these two had going on. Plus, Kyle Soller and Denise Gough weighed in on a few key scenes.
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They Understood Each Other
There’s no getting around it: Syril and Dedra aren’t easy people to work with, let alone like. Syril’s introduced in Season 1 as a fastidious, uptight ISB wannabe whose delusions of grandeur get several of his co-workers killed, his company shut down, and him condemned to beige breakfasts at his mother’s table. Dedra, on the other hand, greets the audience as a woman in a man’s world, the sole voice of reason in a male-dominated conference room gone completely complacent. On the surface, they’re living vastly different lives. Beneath, these two always had much in common, from their dedication to their work to their mutual awkwardness. They matched in energy, if not in Imperial rank.
The shared weirdness is fun to watch, and according to Soller, it was plenty of fun to portray, too. “I think we broke [character] most times, actually,” he said. “It wasn’t hard to do.” Soller cited Gough’s “tiny, minute things with her eyebrow” as aspects of her performance that made him laugh, and he said Gough would claim he does something similar with his eyes and his mouth. “We would do something, and I don’t think we’d even know we were doing it, and after the take we’d be like, ‘You were doing that f**king thing with your eyebrow again!’” he laughed. “We work in very similar ways. We were never trying to throw each other off, but that ‘turn out the lights’ scene was a hard one to get through.”
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They Made Each Other Happy
Is Dedra Meero ever really content? It’s difficult to tell, but there’s no doubt a decrease in her acidity when it comes to Syril. While they got together during the one-year time jump between Season 1 and Season 2, we don’t need to see how it happened to know that Dedra somehow became fond enough of him to let him into her life. Soller, though, wishes he’d had a chance to play that initial Syril-Dedra move-in: “I want to see that sitcom,” he laughed. “Like, trying to move a Star Wars sofa around that apartment, with both of them being so fastidious and insane. How would they have negotiated ‘Your things go here, and my things go here’?”
On Syril’s side, Soller says the desperate obsession with Dedra that drove Syril to pursue her in Season 1 was still there in Season 2, but it had shifted. “It’s morphed into a strange territory that he’s not quite sure of,” he said. “It’s starting to open him up, and he’s wondering what it’s doing to her, as well, and they don’t really know how to negotiate that because they’re not skilled, socially, or have ever had relationships before. What you wind up seeing in the first few episodes is that Syril has softened a bit through their burgeoning relationship.” While we know things didn’t stay that way, we also imagine it’d take a lot to calm a tangle of anxieties like Syril down, and that he must have cared a lot about Dedra to grow so comfortable. They spent so much of Season 1 defined by the irritations and slights that drove them that to see them content during Season 2’s first arc was a surprise, but a welcome one.
Soller also chatted about Syril’s facepalm-inducing moment after his and Dedra’s brief meeting with Major Partagaz (Anton Lesser): “If I say this is the greatest day of my life, does it spoil everything?” Syril stammered in the season’s fifth episode, while standing across from the woman he loves and had been with for two years. “What a doofus,” Soller smiled. “This is the tragicomedy of Syril. He is so socially inept, and so desperate to be loved and approved of, that having a thirty-second interview with Partagaz is the best thing that has ever happened to him. He’s aware that Dedra’s there, but he’s on another planet. He’s not the most tactful of characters, and I just thought Denise’s response was brilliant.”
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They Cared About Each Other, In Their Way
Putting it mildly, Syril and Dedra were never going to have a typical relationship. They’re both villains. The Empire isn’t a receptive environment for romance. It’s no shock, in the end, that their relationship was doomed — but what is surprising is the extent to which they cared about each other.
On Syril’s side, he risked his life to save her during the Ferrix uprising at the end of Season 1, and he clearly still cared greatly about Dedra throughout Season 2… right up until it became clear that she’d been lying to him and involving him as an unwitting pawn in an Imperial genocide. (Whoops.) Yet, Dedra’s manipulation doesn’t seem to immediately disqualify her from loving Syril. Her affection for him becomes clear at a tense lunch with Syril’s mother, Eedy (Kathryn Hunter), when Dedra passionately springs to his defense against her belittling.
Gough was thrilled to have a chance to work with Hunter. “Kathryn is a theatre legend in London,” she said. “I came up through my career with this woman who’d done such extraordinary work on stage. To know that we had that scene—with Kyle, who’s one of my faves, and then Kathryn—it was an incredibly special day.” Gough also praised Hunter’s “mischievous and unexpected” work during the scene. Soller offered a different tidbit about the already classic Andor moment. “The scene with Eedy used to be a dinner in a rotating ball restaurant,” he said. “We got super excited about it, but I think budget —” he paused for a chuckle — “was an issue. It got shifted to a lunch at home, which, actually, was better, because it was in the confines of our apartment.”
Even as Dedra involves the unaware Syril in the Empire’s destruction of Ghorman, she remains besotted with him; she kisses him in the middle of a busy corridor, seemingly uncaring about who might see them; when the operation to destroy Ghorman is imminent, her only care seems to be getting Syril to go home, pack, and get to safety; when she gets word that he’s out on the plaza with the soon-to-be-massacred civilians, she’s visibly horrified and puts herself at risk in an attempt to find him. For a woman whose only genuine smile came from torturing Bix (Adria Arjona), Dedra shows a great deal of emotion when it comes to Syril — and when he dies during the massacre, she breaks down in a haunting display of grief.
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The Tragedy of What Could’ve Been… if Not for Ghorman
Ultimately, Ghorman is what undoes Syril and Dedra’s relationship; both because Syril never makes it off the planet, and because Dedra involving him in the destruction rattles Syril to his core. There’s no glossing over his reaction — in an attempt to get her to tell him the truth, he threatens to throw her out a window and does eventually choke her. Even after that, Dedra still tries to get him to stay.
Soller thinks if not for Dedra’s manipulation, the Empire’s destruction of Ghorman, and Syril’s inability to let go of the embarrassment Cassian caused him, Syril and Dedra might well have worked out long-term. “Yeah, potentially,” Soller said, when asked whether the two baddies might’ve made it, if Syril had made it. “If Syril could have let Cassian go, and the shame of that go — I think if he had not been used as the mole on Ghorman, then I’m sure Dedra would’ve swallowed all of that in silence, and maybe they could’ve gone off somewhere.” Ultimately, though, Soller insists that Syril was swayable because of his heart and empathy, and that being on Ghorman truly affected him. “I don’t know what kind of life they would’ve had together,” he said of Syril and Dedra’s hypothetical happy ending, “or if they’d be drinking Mai Tais on a beach.”
Perhaps it’s for the best that Syril and Dedra didn’t get those space Mai Tais. Happiness for them could only spell doom for the rebellion, and the galaxy sorely needed the Empire’s defeat. Many of the best Star Wars romances are tragedies in the end — Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman), Han (Harrison Ford) and Leia (Carrie Fisher), Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). At least Syril and Dedra had three years together… and they’ll always have that broom closet on Ferrix.
Andor, Season 2, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Disney+
