Building the Worlds of ‘Andor’: How Ferrix Was Built Brick-by-Brick on a Backlot
Karen M. Peterson Production designer Luke Hull crafted a working city for “Andor,” the “Star Wars” series streaming Wednesdays on Disney+. The show, a prequel to the 2016 film “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” follows eventual rebel hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and introduces audiences to new locations and planets. The most ambitious of these is Ferrix, a salvaging outpost on the edge of the galaxy that keeps itself free from the Empire’s interference. The planet Cassian calls home is an arid one, which presented Hull and showrunner Tony Gilroy with the challenge of designing an environment that felt different from Tatooine or Jakku, places “Star Wars” fans know well. Hull, who won an Emmy for his work on the limited series “Chernobyl,” says, “We didn’t want it to fall into the trap of being a town in a desert, or I was quite keen for it not to be a frontier town. Tony was keen that it had a very strong cultural heart. Like you really understood that the people came together, looked after each other there, they weren’t just part of the environment.”