Tony Gilroy, the Andor creator who traded the rebellion for a cellist in Behemoth!

Tony Gilroy

Photo: Bryan Berlin / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 11, 1956 Manhattan, New York City, United States
Occupation	Screenwriter and film director
Known for	Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Michael Clayton
Awards	Edgar · Peabody · Austin Film Festival Distinguished Screenwriter

Tony Gilroy has spent most of his working life inside other people’s films. Studios hired him to turn a dormant spy paperback into Jason Bourne, to rescue a Star Wars spinoff that had lost its way, to sharpen scripts that never carried his name. When he finally directed a film of his own, its hero was a law-firm fixer paid to make problems disappear. Now, after six years building the most closely argued corner of the Star Wars universe with Andor, he has made Behemoth!, a drama about a cellist who abandons the concert hall to play on Hollywood soundtracks: another gifted man working in the service of somebody else’s picture. The question his career keeps asking is how much of the fixer lives inside the author.

Writing was the family trade before it was his. His father, Frank D. Gilroy, was a playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Subject Was Roses and later directed films of his own; his mother, Ruth, was a sculptor and writer. Anthony Joseph Gilroy, the eldest of three brothers, grew up upstate in Washingtonville, New York.

Film was not the first plan. Gilroy, a Manhattan native born on September 11, 1956, finished high school at 16, spent two years at Boston University and left to chase music, playing guitar in bands and trying to break in as a studio musician in Los Angeles until a session alongside seasoned professionals convinced him he would never be one of them. Four decades later, it is the spine of his new film.

His first produced screenplay, the figure-skating romance The Cutting Edge, reached cinemas in 1992. He adapted Stephen King for Dolores Claiborne in 1995 and two years later wrote The Devil’s Advocate, with Al Pacino as the head of a Manhattan law firm who turns out to be Satan. Armageddon carried his name among a crowd of credited writers. Then came The Bourne Identity in 2002, and Gilroy stayed with Robert Ludlum’s amnesiac assassin through The Bourne Supremacy in 2004 and The Bourne Ultimatum in 2007. With Matt Damon in the lead, the trilogy turned a 1980 novel into one of Universal’s most dependable franchises.

He became a director at 50. Michael Clayton, released in 2007, cast George Clooney as the in-house cleaner of a New York law firm. “Why doesn’t anyone do a movie about the back of the house?” Gilroy has said of its origin. The film earned seven Academy Award nominations, including best picture, with Gilroy nominated for both his direction and his original screenplay; Tilda Swinton won best supporting actress, and the script brought him the Edgar Award. Duplicity, a corporate-espionage romance with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, followed in 2009. In 2012 he wrote and directed The Bourne Legacy, continuing the series with Jeremy Renner after Damon stepped away.

The fixer reputation has always cut both ways. In a 2011 GQ interview, Damon said Gilroy’s first draft of The Bourne Ultimatum had been unreadable, the kind of script that would end a writer’s career if it ever surfaced on eBay, while also blaming a studio that had locked a start date before the screenplay was ready; Universal publicly stood behind both men. Years later he was the blunt one. Having co-written Rogue One: A Star Wars Story with Chris Weitz and directed its reshoots without credit, he told Brian Koppelman’s podcast The Moment in 2018 that the production had been in “terrible, terrible trouble,” a remark he later had to clarify. The pattern is hard to escape: his name keeps attaching itself to rescues, which makes it difficult to say what a Tony Gilroy film looks like when nobody needs saving.

Andor was the answer. Gilroy took over the Disney+ series as showrunner in 2019, after three films he had been developing failed to come together, and turned a prequel about a supporting character from Rogue One, played by Diego Luna, into a two-season study of how an empire tightens its grip and how ordinary people talk themselves into resisting it. The first season, launched in September 2022, won a Peabody Award. The second, in 2025, collected 14 Emmy nominations and five wins, among them the writing prize for “Welcome to the Rebellion,” an episode credited to his younger brother Dan Gilroy; the series lost best drama to The Pitt. Gilroy has described those six years as “the most life-changing creative intensity you could ever have.”

Behemoth! is the retreat he says he needed. “I really craved a sanctuary from that,” he told the Associated Press. “I gave myself permission to hide in this movie for a year.” The idea came to him in the intense scoring sessions for Rogue One. Pedro Pascal plays Alex Serian, a former child prodigy from a musical family who leaves a Chicago orchestra to record film scores in Los Angeles, with Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor, Will Arnett and Hank Azaria around him. Oscar Isaac was attached when the project surfaced in 2025 and left before Searchlight Pictures acquired it. Instead of one composer, Gilroy hired nine, credited as the Behemoth! Collective, from James Newton Howard and Alan Silvestri to Michael Giacchino, and paid each of them exactly the same.

The film premiered on October 2, 2026, as the Centerpiece of the 64th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall, and the reviews split. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich found it a “much slippier and more elegant thing” than its title implies; The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney called it an “odd duck, alternately intriguing and frustrating,” and The Guardian gave it two stars. Gilroy, for his part, says he had never written a character quite like Alex, a man who drifts through his own life. “That’s the trick to this,” he said at the festival, “to put him on the train and not have him run over by it.”

Gilroy is married to Susan Gilroy, and they have two children. The family business has never really closed. Dan wrote and directed Nightcrawler, which Tony produced, and their brother John, a film editor, cut Behemoth! and shares a producing credit on it.

Behemoth! closes the Montclair Film Festival on October 25 and plays the Gala section of the Tokyo International Film Festival on October 28 before Searchlight opens it in US theaters on December 4, on a budget the AP reported at $36 million. At 70, the writer Hollywood used to call for repairs has made a film nobody asked him to fix, and December will show whether a drama about a session musician can find room in a market built on the franchises he once kept running.