Diego Luna Already Feels Melancholic About ‘Andor’ Coming to an End, Talks Best Actor Nomination Possibilities
In a new interview with Associated Press, Diego Luna is already dreading the release of the final season of Andor, even if the show still has two months left of shooting. As he continues to push for a nomination in the Best Actor category at the upcoming Emmys, the actor also took the chance to speak about the lack of Latino nominations over the past few decades, a curse that is pretty much meant to be broken this year.
Luna, actor and executive producer on Andor, has never been shy about praising his collaboration with showrunner Tony Gilroy and the rest of his team. And as he explained to AP, he’s not looking forward to saying goodbye:
“I am very excited filming, all the time I feel that we are approaching the end and, therefore, the process is lived with a certain melancholy. There is also an inevitable part of saying how sad it is to leave this team, to leave this dynamic, to leave this time living here.”
Diego Luna is one of four actors that are likely to get a nomination this year. The list also includes fellow Star Wars actor Pedro Pascal for The Last of Us, Only Murders in the Building‘s Selena Gómez, and Jenna Ortega for Wednesday. It’s been a while since a Latino actor was nominated for Best Actor at the Emmys; in fact, the only actor to have competed in the category is another Star Wars veteran (who could potentially join the second season of Andor too), Jimmy Smits, who won in 1990 for LA Law and scored five consecutive nominations for NYPD Blue, the last one being in 1999.
Luna spoke about this lack of nominations for Latino actors in the lead actor category and how we could be on the verge of a huge change because of the overall shift to more diverse stories in the industry:
“What makes me sad is the fact, the fact that the last nomination for a Latino actor in this category was so many years ago, it is very absurd knowing the number of interesting stories that have been told, the number of actors who have done memorable jobs. But it’s also exciting to know that I’m not the only one and that makes me think that good things are coming for people who look like me, who come from where I come from.”
Last but not least, Luna also addressed the elephant in the room for the second season of Andor. During the first batch of 12 episodes, we were introduced to a vast array of characters, most of whom are not in what is now billed as the retroactive “series finale”, 2016’s Rogue One. That means the new season will have to bring some finality to their arcs, and while Luna didn’t confirm as much, that will probably mean tragic ends for some of them:
“It’s the balance that makes this series stick. I think that if something characterizes this series, it is the depth it has in the portrait of its characters. Being the last season, you got to follow the path of all these characters that you met in the first, and well, many of them are not in Rogue One and the stories have to be (brought) to an end.”
Andor is looking to wrap production in August of this year, targeting a release date on Disney Plus by the end of summer 2024. While showrunner Tony Gilroy has been absent from the set since shortly after the WGA strike was called, Stellan Skarsgård insisted recently that the series has not been affected by it.
The Emmy nominations will be announced on July 12.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
