From Shadow to Spotlight: How Elizabeth Dulau’s Kleya Became the Hidden Heartbeat of “Andor”
Tony Gilroy‘s masterful Andor has come to an end. The two-season prequel to Gilroy’s 2016 film Rogue One just delivered arguably the finest storytelling in the Star Wars universe since The Empire Strikes Back. That’s a bold and possibly needless assertion, but if you watched the series (and if you’re reading this, you likely did), my guess is you’d agree. While season one fleshed out Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) fitful, often brutal entrance into the rebel cause and populated the resistance movement with compelling characters as crucial to the nascent rebel alliance as the eventual saviors Luke or Leia ever were, season 2 tracked Cassian’s evolution into a bruised, battered, oft-resistant but nevertheless crucial leader of the rebel cause. Yet the second and final season was far more than a hero’s journey for Cassian. True to Gilroy’s vision of a rebel alliance that’s fueled by lesser-known figures without any Jedi powers, many more critical figures stepped out of the shadows and stepped up to become heroes, and have now stitched their names in the firmament of Star Wars lore. At the top of that list is Elizabeth Dulua’s Kleya.
Gilroy and his cast and crew’s masterclass in storytelling was predicated on the fact that while Cassian gets top-billing, the rebel cause would have been strangled in its cradle were it not for the countless people who resisted the Empire in ways minor and major without getting a Royal Award Ceremony on Yavin 4 to celebrate their heorics, figures whose sacrifice is done in the shadows. These are people who “will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude” as Lutheen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) so iconically put it in season one. Kleya was one of those figures. In season two, her sacrifices are revealed, as is her origin story and the depths of her commitment to the rebel cause.
Andor paid such considerate and narratively satisfying attention to characters like Kleya by also successfully bringing Star Wars down into the streets, revealing the cruelty and sadism of the Empire in ways far more evocative than blowing up Alderaan ever did, despite the death toll of that latter act of genocide being so much greater. The massacre in Ghorman, the pivotal catastrophe that season 2 was built around, is all the more horrifying for how personal it is, how bloody, how measurable. Here we are in the city of Palmo watching the Empire lure innocent civilians into the central square only to murder them in broad daylight while selling the slaughter to the rest of the galaxy as entirely the Ghorman’s fault. The Empire’s cruelty was multiplied tenfold by controlling the narrative, but thanks to resistance tacticians like Kleya and the courage of truth-tellers like Maarva Andor (Fiona Shaw), Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), and Karis Nemix (Alex Lawther), the Empire starts to lose control of the message.
Andor season 2 released its 12 episodes in three-episode arcs, allowing different characters to move into the lead role as the rebellion started to cohere into something approaching a cosmos-wide awakening. And while viewers might have assumed the final three-episode arc would undoubtedly focus on Luna’s Andor, in a surprising and deeply satisfying twist, they mostly belonged to Dulua’s Kleya, Lutheen Rael’s tireless, tactically brilliant assistant. It’s Kleya who runs the whisper machines in the back of their antiquities shop and keeps Lutheen’s work well hidden in the shadows. It’s Kleya who sacrifices the only family she’s had for years to keep the rebel cause running.
Without Kleya, there is a good chance Lutheen is caught, tortured, and the rebel movement is snuffed out years ago, let alone during his increasingly hectic final days. Her role as his communications expert, his memory bank, and his indefatigable and unflappable number two, was clear throughout the first 21 episodes, but it was in the final three episodes of the series that we learn precisely who Kleya is, where she came from, and why her bond with Lutheen is so unbreakable. Gilroy cast Dulua shortly after she graduated from London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and as he told The Hollywood Reporter, once they had wrapped season one, “everyone on our whole show was just in awe. We don’t have a moment of bad film on her.”
Yet Dulua was to get a major narrative promotion in season 2, especially in episode 10, “Make it Stop,” when her tragic backstory is revealed. Lutheen didn’t start out fighting the Empire; in fact, he was an Imperial Sergeant involved in a genocidal raid on Kleya’s home planet when she was just a child. In a moment of self-doubt, Lutheen struggles with his assignment to burn Kleya’s village to the ground, and as he begs the godless galaxy above to “make it stop,” he finds Kleya hiding aboard his ship, and it’s there their bond begins. He names her Kleya, and they leave his life on the Imperialist side to forge their fledgling personal rebellion together, often posing as father and daughter as they make their way across the galaxy, selling one antiquity at a time as they begin to build out their network and their tactics.
It’s in episode 10 that Kleya goes from being Lutheen’s apprentice to a kind of heir apparent, giving the old man the noble death he wanted and the rebel alliance absolutely had to have. She sneaks into the hospital where the Empire is trying to coax him back to consciousness, after he attempted to take his own life before Dedra (Denise Gough) could torture information out of him. But Kleya won’t have it, so she steals a nurse’s uniform, blows up a spacesport to distract most of the forces inside, and dispatches the remaining Stormtroopers guarding him so that she can make it to Lutheen….and then take him off life support. It is perhaps the most important clandestine mission in the entire series, given how much Lutheen knows and how much the rebels stand to lose if the Empire keeps him alive long enough to torture him. She kills her adoptive father to save the rebel cause, fulfilling his own prophecy that he’d never live to see the sun rise on a free galaxy; he would have been immensely proud.
Luthen’s monologue of sacrifice in season 1 was one of the defining and most memorable bits of dialogue in any Star Wars installment since “No, I am your father” (not “Luke, I am your father,” a common misconception). It explained not only Luthen’s sacrifice but, we realize by the series’ end, Kleya’s as well. But her fate wouldn’t be as grim as Luthen’s, a fact he made sure of when he chose to burn their communications equipment rather than have her do it.
“[That monologue] has always been there in the background,” Dulau told The Hollywood Reporter. “I was super nervous because it felt like the entire filming process was leading up to that day. I always had it in the back of my mind, and I deliberately tried not to overthink it. When I looked at Stellan lying there on this hospital bed, I really felt heartbroken for what Kleya was about to do.”
Before he was captured, Lutheen gave Kleya the most important information of their entire careers in espionage, relaying key words that spoke to the Empire’s secret creation of the Death Star, information that she ultimately passes on to Cassian, setting into motion the events that will eventually be depicted in Rogue One, which in turn lead to the Death Star’s destruction in George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars: A New Hope (the end of which includes the aforementioned Royal Award Ceremony on Yavin 4, where Luke, Han Solo, and Chewbacca receive medals.) This makes Kleya an absolutely crucial figure in the history of Star Wars, connecting her directly to the major figures we have known for decades.
“It’s not lost on me that Tony Gilroy has literally written me into Star Wars history that dates back to the ‘70s,” Dulua told THR. “My mom and dad queued up at midnight to watch A New Hope. And knowing that they’re going to see my small part in that chain of events that leads to those stories, I’m just so grateful that Tony would hand me that domino. I really didn’t want to f**k it up. I really wanted to do justice to this opportunity that he’s given me.”
Justice was served. What Dulua recalls about those nervous initial auditions for the role, and the years of work that followed leading up to her ascendance into the Star Wars canon of crucial characters, was the grace and ease of working with Stellan Skarsgård.
“The feedback from the recall was that they really liked you. They thought you were great. The only note was that you seemed a little bit nervous. So they want to see you again, and they just want to make sure that you’ll be able to handle yourself. So walk in that room with as much confidence as you can; walk in that room like you are the dog’s bollocks,” she told THR. “Also, you’ll be reading at Pinewood Studios opposite Stellan Skarsgård, but don’t let that make you nervous. (Laughs.) I think I just burst out laughing because that’s insane. It was just an unbelievable thing to hear.”
So Dulua prepped as hard as she could, learning her lines front and back, and then finally, she met her counterpart ten minutes before her final audition.
“We chatted over coffee. Stellan has this wonderful magic about him. You just forget that he’s the legend Stellan Skarsgård. He really makes you feel at ease, and after just those ten minutes with him, I really felt like I was walking in the room with a friend, with someone who had my back and was there for me. And he was that way, continuously, throughout the next three years. I was intimidated by the scale of this production and how new it all felt, but I’ve never felt intimidated by Stellan. He always felt like my pal who’s got my back.”
Andor is streaming in its entirety on Disney+.
Featured image: Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau) in Lucasfilm’s ANDOR Season 2, exclusively on Disney+. ©2025 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved.
