Adria Arjona on Bix’s attempted rape scene

Spoiler alert: This story discusses important plot developments in season 2, episodes 1-3 of the Disney+ series “Andor”.

Trigger warning: This story contains a description of an attempt at sexual violence.

If you look very, very closely at the inside of the right arm of Adria Arjona, you will see a small tattoo of an “X.” The actor got it on her last day of photographing “Andor” Lucasfilm’s Peabody Award-winning “Star Wars” series, which launched his second and last season on April 22 with episodes 1 to 3-as a way to commemorate her performance as the powerful mechanic Bix Caleen.

“Bix transformed my career in many ways and transformed me as a person,” says Arjona, who also played in the second season of “True Detective”, as well as in “Morbius” and “Hit Man”. “It is the first character I’ve ever grown with. She taught me a lot.”

Bix will certainly go through it in the show. In the final of season 1, written by maker and showrunner Tony Gilroy, she is saved by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) after suffering by debilitating torture by the empire. When the premiere of season 2 records a year later, she lives on the agricultural planet Mina-Rau as an engineer that is often referred to as ‘without papers’.

While Arjona notes that she shot the MINA-RAU episodes a year and a half ago, the (unintended) relevance for the ruthless war of the Trump government against so-called illegal immigrants is not lost. “It is just mirroring that we continue to stumble on the same rock,” she says. “It is one of my favorite parts about the show. It is now relevant and it will be relevant in five years and 10 and 50 years, because we continue to do the same.”

Perhaps there is no clearer demonstration of that concept than the series in episode 3, also written by Gilroy, when an imperial officer, lieutenant Krole (Alex Waldmann), appears unannounced at Bix’s house when she is alone and announces that he knows her immigration status – the power he has in her future.

“I am always looking for ways to … relax,” he tells her. “My shoulders are becoming painful. All that hard work, you have to have strong hands.”

He takes her hand and then pushes her against a wall and forces herself on her.

“You want to think about this,” he says, his face to hers.

“Please, I beg you,” she answers.

“But it’s such a simple choice,” he says.

“I said no!” She shouts, at what time she fails back, furious, and hits Krole’s head with a hammer and finally kills him. Every ambiguity about what happened is erased when Bix calls to another officer: “He tried to rap me!” It is immediately a moving new storytelling limit for “Star Wars” and a method of oppression as old as human history.

“I remember that I read that, and within the truth of that moment of abuse of power, really afraid to go in that scene,” says Arjona. “But there was also something – I am going to curse – really damn powerful that I can show this far in a galaxy, far away. The fact that Tony gave it to Bix was a great honor – and it was good. She is in the most vulnerable condition in which she may be in, and someone is trying to take advantage of her. We have heard that story many times.”

In the days that Arjona worked with director Ariel Kleinman on Bix’s Bawl with Krole, she says that “the only thing I really fought for” Bix broke out for the first time by backing him. “There was something about the return of someone who is exactly what I wanted my reaction if I was ever at the time,” she says. “It just felt very liberating to be able to do that. At that moment I had many women in my heart. For every woman, for everyoneWhen you have a stranger, a male stranger, in your own space, everything is survived. ‘

Arjona was mainly affected by the word ‘rape’ to be said in a production of ‘Star Wars’. ‘The fact that I can pronounce it [loud] – I felt so much power in that, “she says.” I felt it all day long. I felt it when I finished filming, and I went home. ‘

So much of Bix’s storyline this season, Arjona called on to dig deep inside. Starting in the first episode of the season, she was destroyed with PTSS-fed Nightmares about the auditory torture she suffered by the empire, aggravated when Cassian, now her romantic partner, is gone on a secret mission for the rebellion. For research, Arjona says that “she” went into this black hole “about people suffering from a serious tinnitus” and how it influences your mental state. ”

“I have had a good part of panic attacks,” she adds and notes that it has been about five years ago since her last. “Like many people, I went to the hospital with the thought that I had a heart attack. So it was scary for me, back in that headroom – but I was in a very safe environment. With all the research I gathered, I only hope that I could pay tribute to it. It was probably one of the most difficult things I had to do.”

Thinking about the experience of making season 2 brings Arjona back to Gilroy’s decision to cast her in the first place, and what it meant for her to join the “Star Wars” family. “Tony saw something in me that I didn’t even know I was able,” she says. “I remember that I looked ‘Star Wars’ and really wanted to transport myself at these universes, but I never really saw myself in it. So it means the world. We belong at home in ‘Star Wars’. The more ‘Star Wars’ expands, the more it becomes a mirror of our real world, and it is beautiful.”