Genevieve O'Reilly breaks down the "beautifully human" first meeting between Mon Mothma and Cassian in Andor season 2: "We played the moment so vitally different"

One of Andor season 2's most striking moments sees Mon Mothma taking a bold stand against the Empire, delivering a speech in the Senate that directly blames the Emperor for the horrific Ghorman Massacre.

But of course, Mon has to escape the Senate alive afterwards, with the ISB hot on her trail all the while. That's where Cassian Andor comes in, rescuing her in a tense sequence that sees him gun down two Imperial agents.

"What I loved about it was that there was no trumpet," Mon Mothma actor Genevieve O'Reilly says in the new issue of SFX magazine, which features M3GAN 2.0 on the cover and hits newsstands on Wednesday, May 21.

"It was so subtle and beautifully human," she continues. "In fact, we did it so that I was coming into a corridor and it's almost like a second glance of, 'Who's that? I don't know that guy.' The idea that these two people really don't know each other, and how quickly you have to decide to trust or not to trust, given everything that Mon has been through in the lead up, but then in just that 24 hours. But what he does is talk to her about Vel, and that's really clever intimacy that Tony [Gilroy, showrunner] connected it to.

"And then, of course, that big shootout scene!" she continues of their fraught escape, her first Star Wars action scene. "There was that beautiful moment along that really high concourse up in Valencia where Cassian shoots her driver. To be face to face with the reality of the mortality of a rebellion, seeing someone that she knows shot in front of her, and the idea that Cassian is so trained in this. He's a soldier and she is so not," she emphasises. "She's crossing a threshold. We played the moment so vitally different, that she would just be in shock and recoiling and this is really the moment of him offering her his hand, and her deciding to take it."

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Andor season 2 is streaming on Disney Plus now. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which will be available from Wednesday, May 21. Check out the M3GAN 2.0 cover you need to be looking out for on newsstands below...