Don’t Forget About Luthen’s Little Wig

Andor is a complex tale of rebellion and revolution across a vast sci-fi galaxy, so there’s a lot to keep track of — especially since season two is coming out a few years after season one. You’d be forgiven for thinking, as I did, that one of the main characters got a haircut between episodes three and four. After all, there is a one-year time jump between each of this season’s arcs. Maybe Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen Rael just hit up one of billions of barber droids that probably exist on Coruscant. But then, no! After first sporting short hair when he meets with Lonni in the bowels of the city planet, Luthen appears a few scenes later in his antiques shop with the same lavish locks he had in the first batch of episodes, when he was at a Chandrilan wedding.

It’s not a continuity error. I just forgot about Luthen’s little wig.

As one of the foremost and most deranged experts on the tops of Star Wars characters’ heads, of course I should have remembered that Luthen wears a wig when he’s in his public guise as the affable, well-connected proprietor of Galactic Antiquities and Objects of Interest. When he’s getting his hands dirty doing spycraft, he takes the hairpiece off to reveal a much shorter, action-ready cut. When we are going from his meeting with Lonni to his day job at the shop, we aren’t seeing a mistake, the passing of time, or the rapid effects of space-Rogaine; we’re seeing how Luthen operates.

Luthen’s hairstyling is vastly more significant than Princess Leia’s famous buns or whatever Queen Amidala was doing up there. In addition to its narrative function as a disguise that could help stop people from recognizing that the antiques guy is the same person snooping around in a shady part of the galaxy, Luthen’s wig is part of his character. He plays the role of an arts dealer to the Empire’s elite very well, but it is a role. The real Luthen is the cold, calculating rebel we see in private. In the first season’s fourth episode, there’s a small but revealing scene where Luthen puts on the wig and his antiquities seller “costume” and practices smiling and posing to himself, just so that he’s embodying the face he’ll need to be. It’s a ruse, and the wig is a tool to help access that character and all the cover and access the persona grants. It’s likely not an accident that Luthen’s wig is a hairstyle that’s not too dissimilar from Palpatine’s coiffure before he got all melted by lightning. This is how a man of a certain age who is a happy, loyal citizen of the Empire would look, is it not?

And yet, for as much as Luthen’s wig serves as a demarcation between his public and private lives, it’s not that simple. Even when he’s wearing the wig and playing the part, Luthen is still working towards rebellion. He is always listening for rumors, always looking out for possible threats. The wig is aesthetic; a mop on top of a man who burned his life to make a sunrise he’ll never see. As season two continues and the time of Rogue One and A New Hope draws nearer — an era of open war against the Empire — the stakes will continue to rise. Luthen’s double life will fall under more and more scrutiny and be harder to safely pull off. Heavy lies the crown, and in this case, the crown is Luthen’s wig.

So, yes, if you also forgot about Luthen’s little wig, rest assured that Tony Gilroy knew what he was doing. There is not a hair out of place in Andor. Literally.

Related

• Andor Recap: No Creature Comforts
• Luthen Rael Embodies Andor’s Gray Side
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