“I swear I got the job because I was the palest person in Sydney,” Genevieve O’Reilly says of the fateful day, more than 20 years ago, when she took a meeting with a casting agent for Star Wars.
At the turn of the millennium, the newly opened Fox Studios was luring major productions to Australia; from Moulin Rouge to the Matrix trilogy, it wasn’t unusual to see a recent Nida graduate or sun-kissed soap star filling out a scene behind a Hollywood A-lister. O’Reilly, who was born in Dublin, but grew up in Adelaide then moved to Sydney to study acting, was one among many.
“The little roles were populated by those of us who were around,” she says, from her current home in London.
Growing up, O’Reilly had seen 1983’s Return of the Jedi but paid more attention to Princess Leia and the Ewoks than the brief appearance of Rebel Alliance leader Mon Mothma, then played by English actor Caroline Blakiston. But when George Lucas was making his final Star Wars prequel, 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, he needed someone who could pass for a younger version of Blakiston. A certain fresh-out-of-drama-school Irish-Australian looked the part.
“I remember working with Natalie Portman, with Jimmy Smits, really extraordinary actors at the top of their craft,” O’Reilly says of her time in the “well-oiled” Lucasfilm machine. “I got to be with them and just drink all that in.”
“And then the role was cut!” she laughs.
Like Claudia Karvan’s turn as Luke Skywalker’s long-lost aunt in Attack of the Clones, it seemed O’Reilly’s blink-and-miss turn as Mon Mothma would exist only as a DVD extra seen by mega fans – until a decade later, when she received a phone call.
O’Reilly was now living in London, not far from where a new slate of Star Wars films were being filmed under the franchise’s new owners, Disney. She was invited to reprise the role of Mon Mothma in Rogue One, a 2016 prequel set immediately before Lucas’ original trilogy; in it, she sported the bob haircut and white robe Blakiston had donned back in 1983. (“We used to lovingly call it ‘the sack’,” O’Reilly says.)
She was happy to return, but the limitations of the role soon became apparent: “Mon Mothma had always been an expositional character – she was there to inform us what was going on, and where the protagonists would move next.”
This meant that when Disney commissioned a spin-off TV series tracing the arc of Cassian Andor, a rebel pilot played by Diego Luna in Rogue One, O’Reilly wasn’t sold on returning. It was showrunner Tony Gilroy – the Bourne Identity and Michael Clayton screenwriter who had stepped in for reshoots on Rogue One – who convinced her.
“I remember saying to him, ‘Listen to me, I think you’re the best, but I’m not really that keen to step into another expositional version of this woman’. And he said, ‘I promise you, I’m interested in her. Let’s find out who this woman is.”
Blakiston’s only memorable line in Return of the Jedi – “Many Bothans died to bring us this information” – hinted at unseen sacrifice and struggle hidden beneath Lucas’ swashbuckling space opera.
When Andor’s first season aired in 2022, that tragic subtext became its raison d’être. The show also offered viewers something rare: a Star Wars spin-off that actually reckoned with the realities of life in a fascist empire and one that could stand on its own. Andor was a compelling character-driven drama and political thriller that stretched the edges of its genre trappings.
In Andor, Mon Mothma walks a high-wire: the image of a respectable senator while secretly funding the underground resistance. “I show you the stone in my hand, you miss the knife at your throat,” she confides in an old friend. “The Mon Mothma people think they know, it’s a lie.”
From her very first scenes, O’Reilly says, Gilroy fleshed out her double life: “[He] set up the complexity of character – you understand what she has to lose, that there are eyes on her, that people’s lives are at stake. It’s deeply specific and clever writing.”
At the end of season one of Andor, Mothma was on the cusp of marrying off her only daughter for the sake of the Rebellion. Season two picks up on her home planet Chandrila, a world that drips with privilege and high culture. The lavish costumes and sets represent not only the stark wealth disparities across the galaxy, but also how far Mothma has to fall.
“I remember saying, ‘Gosh, I feel like I’m in Downton Abbey in Star Wars’,” she says. “It was really about family and nuance and threat. And it feels deeply human.”
Gilroy granted O’Reilly a rare amount of agency over how her character meets those threats; for several key scenes, O’Reilly says Gilroy went back to his keyboard after picking her brain. “He’s instinctively collaborative,” she says. “He’s interested in nuance. He’s interested in the cells in between things, rather than the skeleton.”
Like the first season, Andor’s depiction of colonial crackdowns and post-truth, authoritarian regimes evoke historical narratives closer to home. At times, it can even seem to mirror today’s news cycle – despite Gilroy’s scripts being completed two years ago, before the 2023 writers’ strike briefly froze the production.
“I think ‘empire’ is a huge part of our human history, across continents, across ages,” O’Reilly reflects. “Empire has been part of us – it’s kind of the ugly side of human ambition, I think.
“We have all been affected by historical empires, in Australia, Ireland, America, Africa, Portugal, France … the tentacles of empire run deep across our humanity.”
Andor’s slow-burning pace and keenly observed tension ensures that when Mon Mothma does finally become the Rebel figurehead that we barely saw in Return of the Jedi, the gravitas of her leadership feels earned – a rallying call rather than a plot dump.
O’Reilly has had other big roles over the years, starring opposite Eric Bana in the outback noir hit The Dry, and Tim Roth in three seasons of Tin Star. But two decades after that first meeting in Sydney, what began as a skin-deep casting choice has become a rare kind of experience – the “opportunity to really be a part of discovering, and putting flesh on the bones of this woman”.
“I believe her,” she adds. “Which is something that you don’t always feel.”