Andor's Blaster Was Plucked Straight From Star Wars Battlefront – With A Few Tweaks
In the "Star Wars" universe, it's not a one-size-fits all situation when it comes to blasters. Han Solo has his DL-44 blaster, which dates all the way back to "A New Hope," when he fried Greedo in the cantina. Then there's the Stormtroopers, who are generally outfitted with E-11 blaster rifles. All are recognizable, and all of them serve a different purpose. When it came to outfitting Diego Luna's Cassian Andor with a blaster in "Andor," the team actually turned to the expanded universe to find inspiration. Specifically, they went to the video game "Star Wars Battlefront."
Martyn Doust, the prop master behind the Disney+ series, explained the process of finding Cassian's blaster for "Andor" in an interview with StarWars.com. "Straight from the very, very beginning, we knew we had to have a cool blaster for Cassian. It had to be something iconic." Ultimately, Doust and his team found their way to the K-16 Bryar pistol from 2015's "Star Wars Battlefront," the reboot of the popular video game series. Doust explained:
"We tried lots of designs, we looked at how they built the original blasters in 'Star Wars.' We went deeper into the Expanded Universe of 'Star Wars,' and we went all the way to the computer games."
In truth, "Battlefront" was a wise place to look. The game is loaded with lots of different blasters to suit different playing styles. Why not turn to a video game that takes place in the same universe for inspiration? It only makes sense. While the K-16 largely suited the team's needs, they still had to make some adjustments to get it just right.
Making the K-16 make sense
The blaster (which you can see in the above image) has a pretty big front end. When it came to bringing the weapon into the world of live-action, Doust and his team wanted to find a reason for it to look the way it does. They actually managed to come up with a pretty creative solution. As Doust explained:
"I had this idea that maybe it's the fact that as you use a blaster in a gunfight, you pull the trigger, the blaster's getting hotter and hotter and hotter, eventually it's not going to work. And with a little flick of the wrist, this whole center section flips over and installs a new cool, cold barrel into the front end of the blaster... It would completely work."
So not only did they bring a weapon from the expanded universe into live-action, but they managed to improve upon its functionality. This is something that Diego Luna embraced and made use of during the filming of the "Rogue One" prequel. Doust revealed that the actor actually got quite good at utilizing this barrel-switching mechanism.
"Diego [Luna] became really great at flicking the wrist, very subtly hitting the button that controlled the mechanism that spun the barrel. You see him do it a couple of times in some of the scenes, and it's just this nice little detail."
And thus, between a video game and some real-world ingenuity, we got Cassian Andor's blaster.