Many Star Wars fans are clamoring for a Kleya Marki series on Disney+ as an Andor spin-off. It’s not hard to see why. Actress Elizabeth Dulau, despite having just a handful of acting credits, is a powerhouse on screen, and Kleya is as vital to the founding of the Rebel Alliance, if not more so, as Luthen Rael is. She is also one of the few characters on the show that actually gets a backstory, though the finale leaves a lot open as far as her future is concerned. Here’s why a Star Wars series featuring Kleya makes a lot of sense.
A Kleya Star Wars series has so much potential
An Andor spin-off with Kleya Marki holds a lot of promise because of how capable she is as a spy and how unresolved her story is after she lands safely on the Yavin rebel base.
The last time we see Kleya is in the Andor Season 2 finale where she watches several rebel soldiers march past her hut, as she sees the culmination of what she and Luthen started many years ago. Since she is a new character written for the show, her future with the resistance is unknown and she is not mentioned in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, giving writers a lot of room for exploration. While she is not Cassian’s biological sister, as much as young Kleya looks a lot like Kerri, Kleya is his spiritual sister of sorts due to their similar backgrounds of being orphaned, taken away from their home planet, and eventually brought into the fold of the resistance against the Galactic Empire.
Starting from the end of Andor, Kleya would experience an incredible amount of significant events within just two weeks according to the Star Wars timeline. This includes everything that happens in Rogue One and Star Wars IV: A New Hope. She would learn that Lonni’s story about The Death Star was indeed correct, that Cassian lost his life to get the plans of the superweapon, that these plans were given to Princess Leia who is captured by The Empire, that she is rescued by Luke, Han, and Chewbecca, and that the base is about to be annihilated by The Death Star. If that’s not enough plot material for a full season, I’m not sure what is.
On top of that, Kleya is one of the few rebels that has extensive skills in espionage and communications. She’s capable of taking on Imperial troops all by herself, as shown by her self-started mission to infiltrate an Empire hospital in Coruscant by disguising herself as a nurse, eliminating numerous stormtroopers, evading ISB officers, and mercy-killing Luthen. That’s a unique skillset that the rebels would not be able to ignore.
That said, there would also be some friction between Kleya and the rest of the rebel leadership, given her allegiance to Luthen and their general mistrust of him. She’s not someone who would take things lying down, though, and she would have support from Vel and Wilmon (there aren’t many from Luthen’s group who are still alive after Rogue One). That’s a great setup for a series, if Tony Gilroy or another skillful showrunner (since Gilroy wants to take a break) is willing to take it on.
As far as the acting, Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy was “just in awe” of Elizabeth Dulau from her very first audition, according to an interview with Entertainment Weekly. Dulau was a long shot from the start, as she was a last-minute replacement for a different replacement for the original actor that was meant to play Kleya. At the time during the casting call for the first season of Andor, she had no acting credit and “just graduated from RADA like 15 minutes ago” (RADA is an acting school in London). Gilroy praises her work further, saying that “we do not have one bad minute of film on her anywhere” and that “she’s like a Meryl Streep, natural, mind-blowing actor.”
All of this is to say that Disney has an incredible opportunity here to create another successful Star Wars series that Andor fans would want to watch.
