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The line between victim and victimizer can sometimes be well-defined, and sometimes it's a bit vague - or both. In the current Disney+ series Star Wars: Andor, actor Denise Gough plays an ambitious security officer in the early days of the Empire. She stands out amidst the Empire as one of the few women in a leadership position, but over the course of the first season that empowering moment is overshadowed by the severe amount of Imperial brutality she is more than willing to dole out.

Earlier this month at Star Wars Celebration in Japan, Gough spoke about her character's nefarious tendencies - and how it's not divorced from reality but is something inspired by reality.

"What you're seeing is someone who's indoctrinated," says Gough. "Deidra's been brainwashed from a very young age that the Empire is the one true power. She can't see outside of that, and actually it's quite tragic because to live that way, neither of these characters has an example of love or intimacy in the way Cassian and Maarva have in the first season - literally telling him what love is, and showing him what love is. Neither Dedra nor Syril has access to that, so to see the effect of that on someone growing up and becoming poor Dedra... You know she can't have intimacy or love or any of it, but you know she still does awful things and must be punished."

Gough calls Dedra "a pure thoroughbred, Empire true believer," and that while she and the show's makers played with the sympathetic idea of her being a "girl boss" and offer a connection to viewers as someone who is "a woman in a man's world," before turning it on its head with, among other things, torturing Adria Arjona's Bix Caleen.

"It's really good to play with the idea of whatever you identify as being, but it doesn't really matter if you're a fascist; you're a fascist. But it's true," says Gough. "I think it was really great to make her female initially, so in season 1 we got to trick people; and now in season 2 she's definitely showing what it means when you live inside the system and refuse to see outside the system, and you refuse to walk amongst 'the other' so 'the other' becomes the enemy. If you live that way, you deny yourself all the things that make us human."

Gough, who grew up in the County Clare region of Ireland, says that the fiction of Andor can be entertaining, but can also be a way to work out issues we all confront in real life.

"Fiction is like an empathy gym," says Gough. "It's where you can find a way to empathize that maybe feels a bit safer since you're watching it versus watching the news. If you have great storytelling, it can open you up to all sorts of new things and I think unfortunately we seem to be doing the same things; the human race keeps doing the same stuff, which means Andor would be as relevant 100 years ago as it would be unfortunately maybe 100 years from now. Hopefully, we can just learn empathy, and it's going to get us out of many, many wars."

Star Wars: Andor season 2 airs Tuesdays on Disney+, now through the series finale on May 13.

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