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Diego Luna: Cassian Andor prequel series to shoot this year, explore 'how things happen'
In 2020, Diego Luna will be one with the Force again.
The Star Wars: Rogue One star is giving fans new hope that Disney+'s long-awaited Cassian Andor series is finally going to start filming.
"Yes, we are doing it. We are doing it this year," Luna told Entertainment Tonight while making the publicity rounds for Season Two of his Netflix series, Narcos: Mexico. "It's happening, and I'm getting ready for it."
Showrunners Stephen Schiff and Tony Gilroy — the latter of whom co-wrote the gritty Star Wars standalone movie and also directed reshoots — have kept a tight lid on plot details, weary of Bothan spies perhaps.
But for his part, Luna revealed that while he knows "very little" about the adventures to come for the rebel captain, he's read some scripts and is "really excited."
"I can't wait," the thesp added. "It is really cool to tell a story where you already know the ending."
The still untitled Rogue One prequel series will explore Cassian's past before that movie, when he teamed with Felicity Jones' Jyn Erso to steal the plans for the Death Star and save the Rebel Alliance, sacrificing themselves in the process. It's expected that the series will likely follow Andor and his curt android partner K-2SO, aka Kaytoo, played by Alan Tudyk, a few years before Rogue One's events as they try to thwart the Empire and restore democracy to the galaxy.
"It's a different approach because of the beauty and it's how things happen. It's not just what happens. It's not the typical way of approaching a story. It's about how things happen, which in fact, is the same that happened in Rogue One," Luna noted. "You know the ending, but you don't know how it happened, and we have that challenge in front of us again, which is exciting."
Gilroy, who cut his teeth in Hollywood penning box office hits like Armageddon and the first three Jason Bourne movies, is set to write the pilot and will direct several episodes. Behind the camera, he's best known for his Oscar-nominated directorial debut, the legal thriller, Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney, and 2012's Bourne spinoff, The Bourne Legacy.
As for his Rogue One collaborator, Gary Whitta — who along with John Knoll came up with the story for the Star Wars standalone — when asked on Twitter whether he'd be involved, the scribe gave a pretty definitive no.
Of course, with J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker concluding the 42-year-old Skywalker saga, the future of Star Wars for at least the next few years is streaming.
When it debuted on Disney+ in December around the time of TROS's release, Jon Favreau's The Mandalorian proved itself to be a gargantuan hit, opening up new avenues of storytelling within the Star Wars universe as it followed the titlular bounty hunter on his quest to protect the Child, aka Baby Yoda, which has become a pop culture phenomenon.
Disney's chief, Bob Iger, has since hinted that the studio is considering "infusing" The Mandalorian with more characters that could lead to spinoffs of the hit TV show.
And of course, plans are in the works for Ewan McGregor to reprise his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in a galactic streaming series of his own, purportedly set after the fall of the Jedi and his exile on Tatooine. After reports surfaced that Disney and Lucasfilm were halting production in order to retool some scripts, McGregor downplayed the brouhaha, saying" the scripts are great," and that the show is still on track for a 2021 airdate.
No word yet on an air date for the Cassian Andor series yet, but if it's shooting this year, as Luna says, perhaps we'll see it sometime in 2021.
