By James White | Posted 26 Mar 2020

Disney+ has launched at last in the UK, and while British viewers are still having to wait to watch all the episodes of The Mandalorian, one eye is also on the future of Star Wars on the service, with word from practical effects expert Neal Scanlan that he's working – under the usual socially distanced conditions, of course – on creatures and characters for the show.

The still-untitled series focuses on earlier espionage adventures in the life of Diego Luna's Cassian Andor, the fighter we met in Rogue One. Alan Tudyk is also aboard as snarktastic reprogrammed Imperial Droid K-2SO. Details have been scarce since then, and the show has yet to kick off production because of the Coronavirus, but Scanlon explains that he's viewing it as a chance to give some beings created for The Rise Of Skywalker and other films, but that ended up not being used, their shot at hitting screens.

"What is fun about this is, in many ways, I don't think it feels different than working on a movie. It certainly doesn't feel like we are making any compromises," Scanlan says. "It's the same creative conditions in every department to do what we can do. We also have this backlog of characters. A lot of the characters that we built for all of the films either didn't make it to the final cut, because that's just the way that the film process happens, or that they are seen so momentarily that there is this wonderful second opportunity to bring back some of the characters that we've made and bring them to this new storyline in a more, shall we say, integrated way. I think it's going to be tremendous. I find that it's a second opportunity for everything that we've made, plus the opportunity of moving TV along, in a sense, at what will not at all be diminished as far as the level of quality, the level of things that we are going to try and achieve."

The Americans' Stephen Schiff is aboard to run the show, while Tony Gilroy, who worked on Rogue One's additional writing and filming, is part of the creative team. It remains to be seen whether the show can start shooting this year.