Alexander Freed Talks Mastering Tension in 'Star Wars: The Mask of Fear' (Interview)

Alexander Freed recently sat down with us to talk all about his upcoming novel The Mask of Fear, which is the first book of the Reign of the Empire trilogy. Our chat ranged from talking about the incorporation of Mon Mothma's Andor storyline to Freed's skill in writing books filled with tension to the ways that we can try to find light in the darkness in our own lives.

Check out our full conversation below or in audio on The Youtini Show, and be sure to pre-order The Mask of Fear which will be available on February 25th.

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The Mask of Fear is the beginning of a brand new Star Wars trilogy, and as someone who has already written their own full Star Wars series with Alphabet Squadron, how was it working on this book knowing that you’d be handing it off to Rebecca Roanhorse for book two?

You know, it was certainly a different experience. I think part of the conceptualization process for this trilogy as a whole is that it’s built so that each book is taking place years apart from the previous one. So over the course of the whole trilogy, you get a sense of the story of the complete reign of the Empire.

But what it does from a creative perspective is it means each book really can stand alone to a large degree. Like we’re getting snapshots in time rather than doing a beat by beat over decades. So sitting down to work on the first book, it was most important to make sure it was a functional, interesting, self contained story that works as its own book.

And then sort of laying out the toys in the sandbox for Rebecca Roanhorse to pick up and use for the second book in whatever arrangement felt best to her. So there were plenty of hooks, plenty of seeds planted, but it really was like: make this work, set the stage, and then the next writer picks up and runs with it.

I love that. Now, selfishly, I have to tell you, Bail Organa is one of my favorite characters in Star Wars history. It started as a bit, and then I just fell in love with him over the years, and Mon Mothma and Saw are definitely up there. How did you settle on these three characters as focal points for this first book of the trilogy?

That was part of the original pitch that came from Lucasfilm. So it was really like these are three characters who have room to tell a story. Right? Like their arc over those years is not necessarily open to a lot of additional building out; their characters are surely set in stone.

We know who they are, but none of them have had deep, deep examinations. I think the closest we’ve gotten is Mon Mothma’s role in Andor. And of course, there’s clearly some Andor connectivity with Saw and Mon.

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They also all represent sort of different takes on the Rebellion [and] what their role is. Mon Mothma and Bail Organa have more surface level similarities than either of them with Saw. Saw’s a fugitive - he’s out there shooting stormtroopers. But they’re still coming at it from very different perspectives.

Bail is really our connection to the Jedi Legacy in a way that Mon Mothma is not. Not just in the sense of obviously Bail worked with a lot of Jedi, [but] he feels strongly about the Jedi. We see him going on adventures in Clone Wars, but also he’s got Leia, right? He’s got the child of the Jedi in his home. He has a direct interest in Vader, in the Emperor, in the Jedi legacy, whereas Mon Mothma really doesn’t.

Mon Mothma is coming at this from a political, social, and cultural perspective, but not from the Jedi religious side of things.

As you were writing them individually, were there any characteristics that surprised you as a writer given their appearances? Did Saw surprise you in any way? Did Bail jump out and do something weird you didn’t expect?

It’s not so much being like, “Oh my God, I never I never expected that to happen.” There’s always an evolution.

You know, Mon Mothma was the character I came in most comfortable with because I’ve handled her in a couple of books and stories previously. So I felt I had a handle on her character. But even with her dealing with her relationship with her husband Perrin, who was introduced in the Andor series, [he was] not previously part of her as a Canon character. So that was something new to explore and to fold back into my own conception of the character. How does that reflect who she becomes, where she’s come from? So I had a lot of fun dealing with their dynamic.

"Bail is really our connection to the Jedi Legacy…He’s got the child of the Jedi in his home."

Bail was firmly the character who I’d done least with before. And one of the conversations that I had with folks at Lucasfilm and Random House Worlds was sort of finding his point of focus on family and just how important that is to him. And so we went through a number of talks in order to sort of position him with making sure that Breha and Leia were at the center of his world while he’s still, you know, he’s not primarily interacting with them over the course of the story, but their role in his life was really foundational in a way that I hadn’t intuitively had in my head immediately going into the project.

Love that. Our friend Tom [Hoeler], your editor over there, said Bail is “a big wife guy,” and you can definitely see that in the book.

But of course, the book isn’t only about those three. Yes, they’re the great focal points, but you also filled it with a lot of original characters that are going to be instrumental in the lives of pre-established folks. What’s that balance like knowing that you have these fixed characters, and you’re making originals to weave around them?

It’s an interesting puzzle whenever you’re dealing with a work for hire project. And I don’t mean that pejoratively in any way. I mean that in the sense of someone has come to you and said “write about this.” And you know when they say write about this, you can’t change this. You can change everything around this.

Fundamentally, you’re being asked to create a work with something at its center.

And in this case, those characters of Mon, Bail and Saw were that unmovable center. So that’s the place where it doesn’t matter how good an idea you have. It doesn’t matter if you’re like, “Oh my God, I could tell the best Mon and Saw story if we just took Bail out and replaced him with someone else.” That’s not the job.

So when you’re working with those - when you’ve got your set of unmovable pillars - it’s really about What’s the most interesting story that uses this as a foundation? And then you can build everything around that to support that conception.

So if I’m doing a story about, you know, X, Y and Z, I need a Separatist character in here. The Separatist movement is such an important part of the era, it’s going to be an important part of politics, it is instrumental in who Saw is. I need a Separatist. Right. And then you flesh it out from there.

You figure out all the other things that character is going to do, and you do that sort of across the board as you figure it out. What’s the story you’re trying to tell?

You mentioned earlier the Andor influence a little bit with Mon Mothma specifically. That show has been brought up in the promo for this book quite a bit. As you were writing, aside from even just Mon’s plot that was added in the show and the relationship with Perrin, did the show itself have any additional significant impacts on your process? Did it add tone? Do you find yourself revisiting it or anything like that?

It’s less than you would think. You know, we never talked about it as an Andor tie in.

We hope that we’re playing in the same thematic universe. And I think part of it was simply like they came to me because they’re like “I think Alex’s default tone is close enough there.” You know, rather than trying to find someone who can imitate Andor, it’s like who do we have in the stable who’s broadly going in the same direction and then let [them do] their thing.

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Which is not to compare my success to Andor’s success in any way. But hopefully I was not fighting against the current to make things more like Andor, because I think that would have been a losing game.

I think there are certain things that are incredibly rare in Star Wars and rarer even in Star Wars novels. The way it was able to just maintain a level of tension constantly was interesting and something that I did spend a little time thinking about, especially within the context of a book that is one of the relatively few Star Wars stories out there that takes place during a time of peace.

Like there’s no rebellion right now. We’re talking about the first couple of months after Revenge of the Sith. So there’s no rebellion, there’s no Clone Wars. The galaxy is basically in, I don’t want to say it’s in a good place because, of course, not really - dictatorship has just started up - but people aren’t shooting each other that much right now.

"The way [Andor] was able to just maintain a level of tension constantly was interesting and something that I did spend a little time thinking about."

And so finding a Star Wars story that was able to keep tension ratcheted up to an appropriate degree, I thought Andor handled that really well in a lot of its non action sequences. And so that is a place that I kind of referenced in my head from time to time.

When you talk about your own tone, kind of mimicking that a little naturally, I don’t think anyone would argue that. I still remember chapters from Shadow Fall that made me sweat when I think of them, because in the moment they’re so tense, and you definitely see a lot of that throughout this book, which doesn’t make it the fastest read, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s one that you want to really sit with and maybe have a walk after every couple chapters.

No one has ever accused me of writing page turners. I vaguely wish I could. I honestly spent a little bit of time trying to make this one, just knowing how much politics and conversations and so forth were going to be in this one. I tried to juice it a little bit structurally thinking about “Okay this is really going to be slow if I don’t put some extra effort into it.” It’s still a slow book, but hopefully a satisfyingly slow book.

"No one has ever accused me of writing page turners. I vaguely wish I could."

Oh, no question at all. You know, it’s one that sticks with you. There are a lot of tense moments where the characters we thought of as “the good ones” have to make the hard choices like sacrificing their friends to survive another day. Do you think Star Wars to an extent has always had this level of moral ambiguity when it comes to its warfare? Or is that something that has evolved over time?

I think Star Wars has always supported a level of moral ambiguity which is different from saying that it’s always been there.

You look at the Original Trilogy. We’re dealing with a lot of iconic blacks and whites, but the world building is such that you can imagine these spaces in the middle. Like there are enough complexities to the Rebellion, we get enough glimpses of the bureaucracies, of the sacrifices that people are making. The camera is not afraid of lingering on “here’s just a nameless X-Wing pilot who’s getting killed here.”

Lucasfilm

So I think it’s a matter of choosing to focus on it…You can do a kind of fairy tale setting where it does feel discordant to then introduce a bunch of characters existing in the gray area, whereas I think in Star wars, the gray area is implied to exist, and it is an authorial choice to go, “You know what? We think there is an audience for going there in this one.”

Yeah, and I love that you do. I think the fact that it is in a “peaceful time” is interesting, because we get to see Mon and Bail kind of figure out what is the gray, you know, where will they land?

But speaking of Mon, there’s a particular revelation that I really love that you put in the book about Mon Mothma. When she talks about taking anxiety medication. It’s part of her character that I don’t think I remember seeing in Star Wars.

Do you think that such a prominent figure basically accepting the need for help with mental health is a signal that we kind of, as a society and as readers are becoming more comfortable with the topic? And are there possibly opportunities for this kind of discussion in Star Wars going forward?

It’s an interesting question, and my instinct is both yes and no.

Like on a certain level, it certainly is a degree of visibility, [but it] says something…that we’re dealing with, you know…not necessarily the most iconic character in all of Star Wars.

You know, [Mon Mothma]’s a recognizable Canon character. And yeah, dealing with that sort of thing in an offhand way where the plot is not about that in any way, but it’s in there, I think that does say something about where we’ve come in the last few decades.

Lucasfilm

I would also counter that by saying, not trying to criticize my own portrayal here, but I think it’s a lot easier to have a character who is well established as being privileged, wealthy, clearly well educated, and a woman dealing with anxiety medication. I think in terms of where we are as a culture, in terms of depictions of psychological struggles in pop culture, I think when you see a Han Solo type character casually referencing taking anxiety medication, I think that that puts us in a different place.

And obviously there are practical issues at hand within that narrative too. Han Solo is not going to have access to anxiety medication even were he interested. But you know, take my point in that there are areas that feel, you know, safer creatively than other places.

And you know, none of us were like, “Oh, you know, we need to normalize anxiety medication. That’s our goal with this book.” It was very much me going like it makes sense that she would have access to this, and she’s a character who would seek assistance in that regard. So yeah, throw a line in there, and we were cool with it. But there’s context.

I never thought about the fact that Mon Mothma is on the same planet a lot of the time and she has like senatorial aides that can probably pick stuff up for her. And when you’re hopping from planet to planet salvaging, you’re not exactly getting refills that easily.

No, not under the Empire’s health plan.

It was day one by Palpatine getting rid of all that, unfortunately.

But with Andor Season 2 ending that whole series in a couple months and now these next two books coming out in the next couple of years, why do you think now is the time to write these stories that seem to be looking at political corruption with a very unblinking kind of powerful lens?

I think there’s a couple ways to answer that. The simplest answer is we live in a world of enormous political divisiveness and upheaval right now. We’re talking globally, right? Globally, over the course of years, things are more turbulent than they have been in a good while. And fiction that deals with these issues is an important part of how we as a society come to terms with these things.

I think also on a more sort of franchise business-oriented level, Star Wars has waxed and waned a bit in that regard. You can look at the original trilogy, you can look at a lot of the supporting material that came out for it - not super politically engaged. Not that there’s no subtext there. Lucas has certainly spoken to his thoughts and intentions around Nixon and Vietnam and the influences that those things had on the Original Trilogy, but I don’t think anyone would argue that the Original Trilogies and the 80s comics and novels and so forth were particularly politically focused.

"Fiction that deals with these issues is an important part of how we as a society come to terms with these things."

I think you see an enormous change in that in the Prequel Trilogy. They get overtly political, both in the content of the storylines, but also in the sort of real world references that Lucas is making. And then you kind of taper off from them for, and there’s a little bit of Prequel series backlash, and there’s not a lot of movies coming out.

By the time Disney is doing the Sequel Trilogy, they’re much more interested in getting back to the sort of franchise that everyone immediately identifies with Star Wars. And now we’ve had a few years of that, and now people are a little bit more open to, “Yeah, let’s get some different takes on Star Wars. Let’s go into some different lanes.” And it expands the pool of Star Wars stories a bit.

So that’s my quickie analysis of the state of the franchise. I’m sure someone else could speak to much greater length and detail about it.

I think that does a pretty freaking good job, if I just say so myself. I think that if you want to talk about giving context to a lot of things, this story right now is going to do a lot for a lot of folks.

Now like you said, this is the time of peace. Clearly there’s conflict in the book. It’s not a great day for everyone, but I think everyone in the real world has felt that to an extent over these last few years that even with the win, sometimes it’s hard to celebrate them as much as you might want to. What would you say is the best way to persevere and keep going in the dark moments; to maybe find ways to acknowledge the victories without feeling like you’re ignoring the hardships?

I mean that’s a big question. Like that’s what religions are based on. I’ll speak to it from a personal level, because I don’t feel qualified to, to advise anyone else on this particular topic.

I think, for me, a lot of it is making sure that in my daily life, in the interactions that I have, in the choices that I’m making, I am living a life of some degree of virtue. Like obviously there are things that I do every single day that I can look at and go, “You know what? That was not the best choice. You could have been more thoughtful about your effect on the world or other people in that particular moment.”

But focusing on the immediate personal level and getting some balance, some equilibrium there as you look to the larger world and seeing where you can make a contribution, I think that matters a lot. Because ultimately, the interactions that most of us are going to have with the person in the checkout line at the grocery store in front of us – that two minute interaction in a day is going to be a lot more powerful than a lot of the things that we can do to affect the world at large in some way.

Which is not to say we shouldn’t be worrying about the world at large; it isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be acting. But yeah, individual acts of virtue is…it’s a way of bearing witness to what we believe and showing other people that we can make a better world.

The Mask of Fear by Alexander Freed will be released on February 25th wherever books are sold.

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