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When we meet Cassian Andor in Star Wars spin-off Rogue One, he's a complete enigma. All we know for sure is that he's been in the fight against the Empire since he was six years old. That's about to change. A new Star Wars series, set five years before Rogue One, is all about Andor. The new show fleshes out the character, offering a deeper insight into his life on the planet Ferrix. In the first three episodes alone, we meet his friends, foes, and family, including his adoptive mother Maarva, played by Fiona Shaw.
"She's very much a daughter of Ferrix," Shaw tells Total Film of her character. "She is actually a member of a thing called the Daughters of Ferrix, who are like a community group of women who keep the moral standing of the planet very well. So she's a very revered person, and she also is a very old person, and she's not so well by the time we meet her in this series."
A lot of what we learn about Maarva comes from flashbacks. We see her scavenging on a crashed spaceship on Cassian's home planet of Kenari. "She and her husband have made a living going around to various planets, collecting bits of metal from spaceships," Shaw explains. "You suddenly see that all of this could be a parallel with Detroit maybe in the '70s, where people were recycling bits of cars. So they're recyclers, there's an element of people who are from another time, who are reusing the world. She's a very anonymous person. I don't think she's a person with a big ego, she's a person with a big heart. And she certainly has a great moral compass, and I think that becomes very, very important in this particular season."
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Much of Star Wars revolves around the relationships between fathers and sons, but Andor brings a strong, multifaceted mother and son bond to the galaxy. Shaw believes Maarva to be part of a long tradition that begins with two complex women from Greek mythology, both of whom she's played before.
"I think all mothers go back to a wonderful root of Clytemnestra, who's a mother who made a terribly vicious choice in order to seek vengeance for a wrong done to her child, and Medea, who kills her children because she loves them so much," she says. "These great mothers, who are also terrors, have a history in the iconography of Western culture, and probably Eastern culture, too.
"But she's a very, very good mother, tough mother. And so I am thrilled that [showrunner Tony Gilroy] explores the mother/son relationship. Very early on in the episodes, you'll see them fighting. They fight because she wants him to tell the truth, and he doesn't want to tell the truth, and he half doesn't want to tell the truth because he wants to protect her. And these are domestic fights that must go on in every household all over the world, every day."
Many of the women in Star Wars are iconic characters in their own right, so did Shaw feel any pressure joining that line-up? Not quite. "Tony makes you feel that you are chosen to be in it. He has written it, and he's chosen the people he wants to represent various aspects of it. So, I didn't feel pressure in that way. But I do feel that Maarva comes down from a long line of iconic women, like Clytemnestra or Medea, all the great women. She is part of people who've had to make huge choices, so it's a very grand gauntlet to have to pick up."
At the end of Andor's first three episodes, it's unclear if we'll be seeing Maarva again – and Shaw won't be drawn on her character's future, but does hint that Maarva still has an important role to play. "She's very present in this because it's a real challenge for [Cassian] to try and negotiate how to cope with his mother in the situation that he's in," Shaw says. "And his mother makes a few very big decisions, and they really affect the series."
Andor drops a new episode on Disney Plus every Wednesday – see our Andor release schedule to find out exactly when the next episode drops in your time zone. For even more on the show, check out our interviews with the cast, as well as Gilroy on that dramatic episode 1 opening and on season 2 of the show.
