Mon Mothma Faces Off With Krennic in Andor Showdown: “She’s Dancing on a Knife’s Edge”

In Andor season 2, episode 6, things get tense when Mon Mothma runs into Orson Krennic at a fancy party hosted by Davo Sculdun. The party seems normal at first, but the mood quickly shifts when Mon sees Krennic, a high-ranking leader in the Empire.

“She knows what she’s in for,” says O’Reilly about the party. “But to come in and see Krennic in there, that’s a real surprise for her. Davo Sculdun has invited Empire right into the home, the height of the Empire into his home.”

Mon and Krennic begin a quiet but sharp argument in front of the other guests. They don’t speak openly about the Empire’s crimes, but they trade subtle jabs. Krennic says, “Insurgencies have a long history of puffing up failures,” while Mon fires back, “You seem fixated on defining people by how much they resist power.”

It’s the closest Mon has come to losing her cool in public. “She’s dancing on a knife’s edge there,” O’Reilly says. “She would love to bring him down, but she can’t. She’s only effective if she maintains composure.”

Even with Luthen by her side, Mon must hold herself together. Her position in the Senate is powerful, and she needs to keep the respect of others. “Her diplomacy is her superpower,” O’Reilly explains. “If she takes off that mask of composure and diplomacy, she’s useless to the rebellion. She’s only effective to the rebellion if she can hold all of it. And so, she must wear those masks.”

The tension between Mon and Krennic is clear, but Krennic also can’t show too much. “You can feel that tension between them,” says O’Reilly. “But of course, both of them have to play a bit of a dance because it’s public.”

That “dance” also happened behind the scenes. The scene cuts between Mon and Krennic arguing and Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau) trying to remove a listening device hidden in Sculdun’s gallery. It all builds up slowly but surely.

Show creator Tony Gilroy and his brother John (who helped direct, edit, and produce) worked hard to bring this moment to life. “These elaborate Swiss watch, multiple character, storyline crescendos, they’re hard to do,” Tony Gilroy says. “They’re not for the faint of heart.”

“It’s an incredible amount of side hustle work that you have to do,” he explains. “Filming on iPhones and cutting temp versions and putting temp music and figuring out the dialogue and getting out a stopwatch. Is it believable that you could be away from a conversation that long? There’s a lot of clerical work that goes into it.”

But in the end, Gilroy says it has to feel easy and real: “All that work has to disappear. It has to look so simple and inevitable.”

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