WARNING: Contains Andor Season 1 spoilers
Shortly after receiving the scripts for Andor Season 2, Denise Gough – aka Star Wars’ most terrifying new antagonist, Dedra Meero – found herself face-to-face with the big boss. Not Tony Gilroy. Not Kathleen Kennedy. It was Emperor Palpatine himself. “As I was walking home, I bumped into Ian McDiarmid,” the Irish actor tells Empire on Zoom, after Andor’s explosive finale hit Disney+. “I said, ‘Hello, boss!’ I thought, if anyone took a picture of this, it’s so brilliant – Dedra having an undercover meeting with the Emperor in Notting Hill.” In the Skywalker Saga, Palpatine was the Empire’s fearsome figurehead, always looming in the shadows. But in Andor, Dedra is out in front – a dangerously driven Imperial officer with a desire for order stronger than the tractor beam of an Arrestor Cruiser. Star Wars has a new face of evil – and it’s the face of Dedra Meero.
That face is one of her primary weapons. Unlike Vader, Palpatine, and Kylo Ren, Dedra isn’t a Force-user. She has no lightsaber, nor the Darksaber. She has no cloak to swoosh, no grand evil designs; just an unwavering dedication to the Empire’s ideologies, and a stare more bone-chillingly cold than the vacuum of space. “My mother used to say to me, ‘You need to smile, because you can look quite sour if you don’t’,” Gough says. “I have a naturally downturned mouth.” Channelled through Dedra Meero, it’s a look that could power-down the Death Star.
In fact, Dedra’s face is so powerful, it does things even Gough’s cannot. Filming Episode 9’s gruelling interrogation – in which Dedra tortures Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), an ally of Diego Luna’s central hero, Cassian Andor, by flooding her mind with the screams of a dying civilisation, children included – it took on a life of its own. “When I watched it, I was like, ‘How did I get my face to twitch there?” Gough recalls. “I can’t do that now! If I tried to do that for you, it’s not possible.” That tic (“Twitchy-face Gough,” the actor dubs it) emerged organically – perhaps a result of Dedra’s body language being otherwise under complete control. “Ben Caron [director] set up my character,” credits Gough. “Initially, Dedra was fixing her belt, doing her thing, and he went, ‘It’s a bit swishy. Don’t do any swish. Try it with your hands behind your back.’ And that was it. Everything was really economical. She became still.” That stillness provides a presence so strong, Vader could feel it a parsec away.
My agent said, 'So... Star Wars have called.' I thought, 'That's ridiculous.'
When showrunner Tony Gilroy approached Gough for his revolutionary spy-thriller-in-space, it wasn’t to find out if she’d be right for it – that was already clear to him. (“I don’t quite know what that says about me,” she laughs.) Instead, he was trying to win her round to the idea, having been wowed by her lead performance in stage smash People, Places And Things as a drug-addicted actor – starting in the smallest room at the National Theatre, then moving to the West End, before transferring Off-Broadway in the States. Before bagging that role, Gough was on the verge of quitting acting; when she got it, she was so overwhelmed she “couldn’t stop crying.” Unbeknownst to her, it began a path towards Star Wars. “I never met Tony Gilroy when I did that play,” she says. “I was just doing the play, and then I did another play and some TV and film.” One abandoned Game Of Thrones spin-off prequel pilot later (“I had a great time, worked with amazing people, got paid – and then it wasn’t picked up, and I was like, ‘Oh, great! I don’t have to do the five-year contract!’”), the galaxy far, far away beckoned. “My agent said, ‘So… Star Wars have called.’ I thought, ‘That’s ridiculous,’” remembers Gough. There was one issue. Two, actually: she didn’t know who Tony Gilroy was, and she knew next-to-nothing about Star Wars.
“I think I saw them when I was a kid, because I have five brothers,” says Gough of her history – or lack of – with cinema’s greatest space-opera. “I remember a piece of a toy that might have been the Death Star. But maybe that was Star Trek.” An admission that she didn’t know her Wookiees from her Womp-rats was music to the showrunner’s ears. “He said, ‘That's great, me neither.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, that's interesting.’” Soon, Gilroy was giving Gough a rundown of what his series would be. Rather than keeping the show under a veil of secrecy, he sent her scripts for the first three episodes. “I’ll never forget it,” she says. “I was sitting at my kitchen table, and I thought, ‘This is magic.’ All the [scenes with the] kids... It was like reading a really great play.” That her character doesn’t even appear until Episode 4 didn’t matter, Gough was already in – an hour-long Dedra debrief with Gilroy sealed the deal. “I was like, ‘Okay, yeah. I want to do that. Definitely.”
While she undertook a Tony Gilroy deep-dive, Gough opted not to do the same for Star Wars. “I watched Rogue One,” she says. “But I didn’t [watch them all]. I thought, ‘I don’t want to have too much information. I don’t want to be doing a version of something, or stepping into a club. I just want to play this woman, and then see what happens.’” Instead, she took the initial bones of Dedra – pitched to her by Gilroy as both ‘fascist’ and ‘badass’ (“I remember that, because it’s such an American thing to say,” she laughs) – and set to work fleshing them out. And what she found terrified her.
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While Star Wars fans had to wait months to see the people of Imperial-occupied Ferrix rise up against their oppressors at Maarva Andor’s (Fiona Shaw) funeral in Episode 12, Denise Gough’s Andor experience started there. “My first day was Ferrix,” she said, recalling her arrival on the eight-acre town built at Pinewood Studios – a living, breathing, industrial planet. “I was given my two Death Troopers – one of whom had to be trained to run like a Death Trooper and not like a musical theatre star – and I couldn’t help myself, I just started doing the [hums the Imperial March]. Then, everyone started doing it.” From the very start, a rebellious spirit was in the air. “Fiona’s voice was over all of us,” Gough says, recalling the finale’s fire-and-fury funeral monologue from Ferrix’s formidable matriarch. “Except, at the end, she didn’t say, ‘Fight the Empire!’ She said, ‘Fuck the Empire!’ Which we were all really excited about. But we weren’t allowed to keep it, obviously.” Even behind the scenes, Andor wasn’t your typical Star Wars show.
That culmination of Dedra’s arc – facing insurrection, nearly dead, saved by underling stalker Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) – appeared seamless to viewers. But for Gough, revisiting those scenes brought relief. “When I watched the finale, I was really proud,” she says, “because I hadn’t built her yet.” Assembling a villain that audiences could both cower from and – dare we say – occasionally root for, wasn’t without its challenges. Early in the shoot, wrestling with Star Wars technobabble, Gough froze. “I had to say, ‘I need a multisector data blend going back two years.’ And I couldn't do it. I couldn't get my mouth around the words,” she remembers. “Ben Caron and I sat in the corner of the set, and I was like, ‘You don’t understand, Ben, all anyone has told me for the past five years is that I’m really excellent at acting. And now I’m really not. This is terrible.’” Getting past that block involved channelling the environment where Dedra Meero was first planted in Gilroy’s mind. “I realised I needed muscles that I only usually use on stage,” Gough explains. “Tony says Anton Lesser [Imperial boss Partagaz] makes exposition sound like sonnets. Once I got it into my body, that language became really fun.”
Speaking to Gough, it’s clear she’s fascinated by Dedra – by her formidable abilities, by her terrible conviction, by the fact that she’s both entirely transparent and utterly opaque. Perhaps that’s her true power – how contradictory and commanding she is. “The writers started her somewhere, and then she just came into her own,” Gough relays. “They were cheering for her. Here’s this woman, surrounded by all these men, and none of them are doing their job properly. And then she goes to Ferrix, and they’re like, ‘Oh shit, what’s she doing? Why is she doing that?!’” For all the endless questions the character poses, Gough is clear on one thing: Dedra’s power in the Empire might increase, but her all-consuming dedication to the Empire’s ideologies are ingrained from the start. “It just keeps growing outwards. It’s directly relative to how much space she’s given – she’ll fill that space with her need for order,” she says. The more Gough speaks, fresh answers keep coming. “I also don’t see her as wanting to climb the ranks,” she says, feeling the idea out as she says it. “I don’t think these [badges] on her jacket are what she’s after, even. What’s really terrifying is, it’s way more than that. It’s like she’s saving the Empire. She’s interested in actual control of everyone, and everything.”
I was really worried about her being saved by someone.
That level of absolute conviction, Gough argues, pitches Dedra as more the antithesis of Stellan Skarsgard’s shadowy Rebel organiser Luthen Rael – who, by his own admission in a scorching standout monologue, declares: “I burn my life to make a sunrise I know I’ll never see” – than that of Andor’s title character. “She’s sacrificed everything,” she explains. “She doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a life. She’s prepared to be despised.” It’s less that her life is burned, Empire argues, than it is simply… neglected. “She ices her life,” agrees Gough. “Everything is iced out. Everything. Luthen burns it – there’s an energy to that. But Dedra’s is just as painful. She’s frozen everything.” Perhaps, she reasons, that’s another layer to Dedra’s rejection of Karn outside the ISB building. “When we were playing that [scene] I was fucking furious. ‘How dare he touch me?’,” Gough recalls. “But when I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s never been touched. Never. Yes, this guy can be construed as creepy and weird. But what does that do to a woman who’s never been with anyone? Ever? That’s Tony, and Beau [Willimon] and Dan [Gilroy], the writers. ‘Dedra is a dominatrix’ isn’t as interesting to me as Dedra as somebody who has serious issues with intimacy, and is way overwhelmed by this person’s energy for her.”
As the shoot continued and Gough’s grasp on Dedra deepened, she was ready to relish her at her absolute worst. “By the time I got to the interrogation,” she says of Bix’s torture, “I was just like, ‘Let me at it! I love this so much!’” She did, though, have initial reservations about Dedra’s part in the finale. “I was really worried about her being saved by someone,” she admits. “Like, ‘What?! The most evil woman in the universe, and she gets rescued?’ Tony laughed at me, because I was so scared of it.” Dedra’s horror that her rescuer is – god forbid – creepy-stalker Karn was the extra twist that got her back on board. “He’s so smart, Tony – he even undercuts that. She says to Karn, ‘I suppose I should thank you…’ But she doesn’t thank him! We figured out a way that when she gets into that little room, the first thing she reaches for is something she can smash his head in with. She may be rescued, but she’s not happy about it.” Now that’s a terrifying thought – what would Dedra Meero look like when she is happy?
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The next time we see Dedra Meero, happiness is not likely to be on her mind. With resistance brewing, Andor’s second and final season – already confirmed to cover the four years between the Ferrix uprising and the start of Rogue One, jumping a year every three episodes – holds much in store. Perhaps her chance encounter with McDiarmid could prove prophetic for Season 2. Might Dedra meet the Emperor himself? With production now underway, Gough is more occupied grounding herself in the time-skipping structure (“I’m just getting my head around that,” she says), and finding yet more sides of the character to explore.
“What I’m really hoping for is Dedra out of uniform,” she says. “I would look at Genevieve’s [O’Reilly, Mon Motha] costumes like, ‘Oh my god.’ Michael [Wilkinson, costume designer] deserves a real shout-out. I did one of my fittings and I put on an outfit and said, ‘This is so Mon Mothma… I can’t wear this, can I?’ He was like, ‘No.’” Still, the notion of seeing Dedra in a new context, away from her pristine Imperial clothes (“Part of her fear in Ferrix is that she’s in her white coat being dragged along the floor – there’s dirt everywhere!”), is a fascinating one. Her uniform feels like her true skin – who is she underneath that? “We were talking about, ‘Would she have jewellery? What would her hair do?’,” teases Gough. There are still questions about Dedra to be answered.
One thing’s certain, though: the pantheon of all-time-great Star Wars villains has a new fixture – and appropriately she’s a rogue one. Not a Sith Lord, not power-hungry, just single-minded and fearsomely fanatical. She’s as smart as her Rebel enemies (“She thinks exactly like them – she is a Rebel!”), entirely disdainful of her inferior superiors, and ready to make life even more difficult for Cassian Andor and company. In Gough’s own words? “I am going to Dedra the fuck out of the second season,” she warns. The Empire’s new face of evil is ready to strike back….
Andor is streaming now on Disney+
