The one role Diego Luna has no interest in playing again: “It could be a disaster!”
In an era where it’s increasingly easy to be cynical towards Star Wars, Andor offers a shining light.
A tense political drama with strong themes of self-sacrifice and social responsibility, the show received rave reviews across the board, with many deeming it the greatest thing to ever take place within George Lucas’ galaxy-sized sandbox. This was all good news for Diego Luna, who reprises his role as rebel Cassian Andor from the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Prior to his tangles with the Empire, Luna was possibly best known for his role in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también, inspired by the director’s fascination with “crap” teen movies, which follows two teenage boys (played by Luna and his real-life friend Gael García Bernal) who embark on a life-changing road trip with an older woman (Maribel Verdú).
The film broke the record for the highest opening weekend gross in the history of Mexican cinema and was also nominated for several major American awards, which helped bring its actors and director to a wider audience. As with any great film, there have been calls for a sequel to Y tu mamá también, but when speaking to The Guardian in 2022, Luna was very blunt about his thoughts on a hypothetical sequel.
“It could be a disaster!” he exclaimed, “I don’t think it’s worth it. It was special and unique, but it was part of its time. Films like that are like marks on the ground; they’re a reminder of something that happened and is gone. We cannot just say, ‘Let’s do it again’”.
When we leave Tenoch (Luna) and Julio (Bernal) at the end of the film, their friendship has fallen apart, and the final scene shows the pair having coffee together after a year without contact. Tenoch tells Julio that Luisa (Verdú) has died, freaking him out, after which he leaves and promises to see Julio again soon, but the narrator reveals that this was their final meeting. There would need to be a little bit of retconning there to make a sequel work, but it’s theoretically possible.
The current Hollywood machine runs on nostalgia, where barely a month goes by without a new sequel, remake, or reboot coming out, to the point where many observers feel like there’s no room for anything new to break through.
While there have been good so-called ‘legacy sequels’, more often than not, they are soulless, barely shrouded efforts to make money. The story was left in such a good place that it would be really hard to tell a new one, as well as the fact that Luisa, who was such a key part of the film, is dead.
While I trust that Cuarón would take enough care with the story and characters that made him a star, if Luna isn’t invested in a second Y tu mamá también, then it simply won’t work. Some things should just be left the way they are, and this is almost certainly one of them.
