Reprising his most popular on-screen role in the Star Wars prequel series Andor, Mexican actor Diego Luna has won critical raves and mainstream fans. Can he finally take a breather and enjoy his success?
By Drew Taylor
Photography by Carlos Jaramillo
Diego Luna is tired.
Perhaps this is a foregone conclusion.
After all, he has spent months promoting the second and final season of Lucasfilm’s Andor, ping-ponging from press events in Los Angeles and London to appearances at Star Wars Celebration, an all-Star Wars fan convention, which was held this year in Tokyo, Japan. When we spoke, Luna had just wrapped a week-long stint filling in for Jimmy Kimmel as host of his late-night show. Luna had welcomed Andor cast members like Adria Arjona, who plays Bix, Andor’s on-again/off-again love interest and the heart of Season 2, for lighthearted banter. But Luna was also very open about his feelings on the Trump administration, which at the time was pulling people off the street and detaining them under questionable legal authority. (Many of them, like Luna, were born in Mexico.) In one pre-taped bit, Luna and Alan Tudyk, who provides the voice and motion-capture work for Andor’s trusty droid sidekick K-2S0, donned Stormtrooper costumes and anonymously interacted with tourists on Hollywood Blvd. “This is the worst summer job ever,” Luna grumbled from within the helmet.
But exhaustion—or the threat of it—has become a key part of his Andor story.
Star Wars fatigue was at a peak when Andor debuted in 2022, arriving after the middling response to other recent franchise TV spinoffs like The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Still, Lucasfilm and Disney+ had a lot riding on this ambitious prequel to the 2016 feature hit Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The studio sank a reported $645 million on Andor’s first two seasons, an eye-popping figure compared to the roughly $100 million spent on Season 1 of The Mandalorian.
Thankfully, the response has been otherworldly. The show scored a 96% approval from Rotten Tomatoes critics and picked up eight Primetime Emmy nominations in 2022, including a surprise nod for Best Drama Series. While Andor went home empty-handed on Emmy night, the response bolstered Disney+’s confidence in producing a prestige series with genuine watercooler appeal. Further proof: The audience grew for the second season, hitting a record for single-day viewership for the final batch of episodes last fall.
What has hooked critics and fans is creator Tony Gilroy’s timely vision of a galaxy rife with political intrigue and conflicts between the rising tyrannical Empire of Darth Vader (who doesn’t even get a cameo in the show) and the struggle of underground rebels to counter that threat. The series follows the rise of Luna’s Cassian Andor from smalltime smuggler to radicalized leader of the Rebellion, leading up to the start of his mission in Rogue One to lead a band stealing the top-secret plans for the Death Star that figures so prominently in the first Star Wars. (Spoiler alert for a nearly 10-year-old movie: Cassian doesn’t survive Rogue One, ultimately embracing martyrdom for the cause.)
“What Tony brought, was this clarity, this boldness, this, this sense of something different,” says Luna, who first broke out in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 art-house hit Y Tu Mamá También. “Another thing that Tony did was he had a great idea on how to make sure this format would serve for us to tell a story that hasn’t been told in Star Wars—the story of all those anonymous people involved in a rebellion.”
While Gilroy initially conceived the show to unfold over five seasons, Gilroy and Luna (who’s an executive producer on the show) decided to condense a planned four-season arc into a single season, with three episodes for each year leading up the start of Rogue One. As Luna recalls, the decision came as the two met up in Scotland after a long day of location shooting on the first season. “We were having a Scotch and talking about how impossible it was going to be to deliver five seasons of this,” Luna says, noting that each season took more than three years to produce given the tricky logistics and time needed for effects-heavy postproduction. Plus, the still-boyish 45-year-old actor realized that there was a good chance he might not look like the Cassian of the film by the end of a fifth season.
Luna, who spent two seasons on Netflix’s Narcos, also thinks that’s the perfect amount of time to commit to episodic television. “More than that, I think will probably get me crazy—it’s way too long in your life, just playing with one story or one character,” he says. “I’ve been with the character for 10 years and it’s been a hell of a ride. I’m always going to keep these memories and these connections I made, but that’s it, man, that’s it. I have a lot of things to do and to think of and to explore.” (The actor co-stars with Jennifer Lopez in Bill Condon’s big-screen musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, due this fall, and recently wrapped his feature directorial debut, A Mouthful of Ash, which he also co-wrote and produced, based on the novel by Mexican author Brenda Navarro.)
I’ve been with the character for 10 years and it’s been a hell of a ride.” —Diego Luna
Andor is clearly a high point for Luna, and for the ever-expanding Star Wars franchise, in part because it digs into more thoughtful, grown-up themes than your typical sci-fi adventure yarn. As Luna’s title character hurtles toward his fate in Rogue One, his allegiances are tested while his mission is solidified. The burgeoning Rebellion is viewed through a kaleidoscopic lens—an uprising on a small planet serves as a key part of the Empire’s plan to justify its genocidal tendencies; a wedding between important families on an affluent world exposes the cracks in the highest echelons of dissent; and Andor’s relationship with Bix becomes the ultimate catalyst for his path of self-sacrifice. It’s both grand and intimate, conceptually bold and deeply relatable. And it resonates so, so well in today’s fractured, unsettling times.
“It was a joy, because I was going back to the character,” says Luna, who had his biggest box office hit with Rogue One amid a remarkable career working with acclaimed directors like Steven Spielberg, Barry Jenkins, and Harmony Korine. While he had the leading role, Luna was fascinated by how the series explores “a way into a community, or communities, that become the factions that create this social climate for revolution.”
And just as Andor mirrors certain social revolutions, the show has also inspired some real-world acts of defiance. On June 14, when protesters rallied against Trump under the “No Kings Day” banner, Andor was quoted liberally, as in signs reading “Remember: I have friends everywhere,” with the Rebellion logo. Others quoted the manifesto of Karis Nemik, a character from the first season: “Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Remember that fear is the mask of oppression. Remember this: Try.”
Luna is not surprised how viewers have found real-world parallels in the show’s fictional storylines. “It becomes a gigantic mirror, and it obviously speaks so much about what we’re going through about the present,” the actor says. “Tony wasn’t trying to predict anything, but he was being very meticulously rooted in our past. Therefore it becomes pertinent.” No matter when the show had come out, Luna believes it would have reflected some part of the larger world going through turmoil. “We were not trying to do something that committed to in a specific time or a specific moment or a specific expression of authoritarianism—Tony was very, very clear about that. I think that is the strength of science fiction.”
Simply being a part of the Star Wars universe will resonate with viewers for years, Luna knows. “New generations will be introduced to this, the way this was introduced to me,” says the actor, who recalls seeing the original trilogy in the late 1980s when he was a boy. “With these stories, with these characters, you know that it would last in time differently, because there’s a fandom, because there is a structure, because you’re now part of something bigger than just your participation in it.”
Andor might take place in a galaxy far, far away, but in many ways it feels like it’s happening right now, much closer to home. And Luna is particularly fascinated by the possibility that the show might endure—and how future viewers might draw entirely different lessons from the saga. “What is it going to mean to a generation that doesn’t even know about today?” he wonders. “How is it going to talk to them?”
CREDITS
Creative Director: Michaela Dosamantes.
Fashion Editor: Karolyn Pho.
Production: Daisy Robinson for Brachfeld.
Lighting Technician: Garey Quinn.
Animal Wrangler: Salvador Juárez.
Market Editor: Dan Victoria Gleason.
Grooming: Diana Schmidtke.
Photo Assistant: Michael Irwin.
Fashion Assistant: Abigail Jones.
Intern: Hannah Loewen.
Location: Private home in los Angeles through Image locations.
Location Manager: Bobbi Chinlund.
by Lara Apponyi
Carlos Jaramillo
is a photographer who was born in McAllen, Texas, and is now based in Los Angeles. He is a graduate of School of Visual Arts with a degree in photography.
