“Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks. It leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”
In one of the final moments of Andor, a room of Imperial officers listen to a recording of an anti-fascist manifesto that’s broadcasting across the galaxy. As the audio stops, one of them remarks: “Just keeps spreading, doesn’t it?”
The manifesto is read passionately by Alex Lawther, who plays the revolutionary figure Nemik in Andor season 1 and dies during a critical mission when he’s crushed by a pallet of stolen Imperial credits. The fact that his beliefs live on fits nicely with his own beliefs in the power of revolution.
Nemik’s speech resonated with fans when he first delivered it in season 1, and it only becomes more powerful as a capstone to the entire show. But for Lawther, the news that fans had become fixated on his character’s manifesto came as a surprise.
“I had no idea,” Lawther tells Polygon. (Lawther currently stars in Alien: Earth, and we’ll have more from him on the FX series in another article soon.)
He only found out long after filming season 1, when Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy let him know the speech would be reused as a coda for the series finale.
“He wrote this very beautiful email about the resonance of that particular piece of writing,” Lawther says.
When I ask what the email says, the actor quickly pulls it up on his computer and starts to read: “I’m sure you’re aware of how deeply our work together has landed — And I was like, Oh, actually, I’m not really that aware of those things.”
Before they recorded the original speech, Lawther said he bugged Gilroy incessantly to reveal the content of Nemik’s manifesto.
The writer declined until the very last minute, which Lawther admits in hindsight was probably for the best.
“I’m glad I didn’t have time to sit with it,” Lawther says. “I’m glad that we just did it off the cuff. When writing is good, it’s better not to spend too much time thinking about it. The writing does a lot of the work.”
The fact that those words came back in Andor’s final episode are a nice bonus for Lawther, who otherwise has nothing to do with the show’s second season.
“Because of Tony’s cleverness, I get to sort of live on in a way,” he says. “But I wish I hadn’t been killed by that trolley full of credits.”
