Diego Luna

On 13 May 2026, at Cannes, the audience applauded for five minutes at a Mexican film about a 21 year old woman who emigrates to Spain. It was directed by Diego Luna, who by now has two careers running side by side: the actor millions of people know from 'Star Wars', and the director and producer who has spent twenty years pushing films nobody else wants to make.

He was born on 29 December 1979 and grew up backstage. His father, Alejandro Luna, is one of the great set designers of Mexican theatre; his mother, Fiona Alexander, was a British costume designer who died in a car crash when he was two. He was raised in Mexico City, in the theatres where his father worked, and started acting at seven, on a stage.

As a boy he did telenovelas, among them 'El abuelo y yo' (1992), where he met another child who would end up in the same trade: Gael García Bernal. Their mothers were friends, the two of them became inseparable, and thirty years later they are still setting up projects together.

Y tu mamá también and a whole generation

His first international part was in Before Night Falls (2000), directed by Julian Schnabel. What changed his life was Y tu mamá también (2001), the Alfonso Cuarón road movie in which he and García Bernal cross Mexico with Maribel Verdú.

It premiered at Venice, where the two friends shared the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best young performer. At 22 Luna was already one of the faces of the new Mexican cinema. The film went on to an Oscar nomination for its screenplay and became one of the most widely seen Spanish language releases of its decade, Britain included.

Hollywood without leaving home

What followed was a permanent back and forth between two countries. He was in Frida (2002) with Salma Hayek, shot Soldiers of Salamina (2003) in Spain for David Trueba, and in the United States went from the western Open Range (2003) to The Terminal (2004), where Steven Spielberg had him courting a flight attendant in front of Tom Hanks.

Then came the struggling boyfriend in Milk (2008) opposite Sean Penn, a reunion with Gael in Rudo y Cursi (2008) for Carlos Cuarón, the factory worker of Elysium (2013) with Matt Damon, the voice of Manolo in The Book of Life (2014) and a small part in If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) for Barry Jenkins.

He took lighter jobs too, including the telenovela heartthrob spoof of Casa de mi padre (2012) with Will Ferrell and the drug lord of Blood Father (2016).

All the while he was building the other half of his working life. In 2005 he founded the production company Canana with García Bernal and Pablo Cruz, which backed Sin nombre (2009), Miss Bala (2011) and The Chosen Ones (2015). Out of the same office came Ambulante, the touring documentary festival that has been taking films since 2005 to Mexican towns with no cinema.

He also started directing: Abel (2010), which played Sundance and Cannes; Cesar Chavez (2014), about the Californian farm workers' union leader; and Mr. Pig (2016).

In 2018 the two friends went a step further and set up La Corriente del Golfo, the company they work through now. It produced Chicuarotes (2019), the film García Bernal directed, the pandemic era talk show 'Pan y Circo' that Luna made for Amazon, and 'Todo va a estar bien', the series he created and directed for Netflix.

Cassian Andor, and a Star Wars shot in Britain

In 2016 he put on the rebel fatigues of Cassian Andor in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first film in the saga led by a Latino character who kept his own accent, something Luna has talked about a great deal. The film went past a billion dollars and changed the scale of everything else. It was shot at Pinewood, which is where he would spend a good part of the next decade.

The character then got him Andor, which Disney+ launched in 2022 and closed in 2025 with a second season that much of the press rates as the best thing 'Star Wars' has produced outside the original films. It was made almost entirely in Britain, between Pinewood and locations across England and Scotland, with a cast built largely out of British and Irish stage actors alongside Stellan Skarsgård, Denise Gough and Genevieve O'Reilly. It brought him two Golden Globe nominations for best actor in a drama series.

The American television academy left him off its 2025 list despite the show's fourteen nominations, an omission the creator, Tony Gilroy, publicly complained about. Luna did win best actor at the Critics Choice Super Awards.

In between he became a familiar face to a different audience as Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in the first two seasons of Narcos: Mexico (2018 and 2020), which won him a Platino award. In 2024 he teamed up with García Bernal again on La máquina, the boxing series they produced together and which brought another Golden Globe nomination. It was their first job in front of a camera together since 'Rudo y Cursi', sixteen years earlier.

Cannes, Netflix and a private life kept quiet

His 2025 and 2026 have been busy. He starred in Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025), Bill Condon's musical version of Manuel Puig's novel, playing Valentín Arregui, a political prisoner locked up and tortured in an Argentine jail, opposite Tonatiuh and Jennifer Lopez. It premiered at Sundance, went down well with critics and lost a fortune at the box office.

In May 2026 he was back at Cannes with 'Ceniza en la boca', his fourth film as a director, adapted from Brenda Navarro's novel and led by Anna Díaz and Adriana Paz. It is a film about migration told from the inside, and the best reception he has had behind the camera.

This year also brings Mexico 86, the Netflix film about how Mexico came to host the 1986 World Cup, in which he plays the official who pulled it off, and he has joined the cast of Disney's live action 'Tangled'.

For all the work abroad, he never really left: in 2017 he moved back to Mexico City, where he still lives and produces.

He has also been a steady public voice on migration and on Mexican politics, on his own show and off it, which is unusual for an actor with a Disney franchise on his CV.

He says little about his private life. He was married to the actress Camila Sodi between 2008 and 2013 and has two children, Jerónimo and Fiona, the second named after his mother. Since 2019 he has been with the actress Marina de Tavira, a relationship both of them keep well away from the press, give or take the odd red carpet like the Golden Globes in January 2026.

That night, with the series finished, he summed the moment up in one line: he had come to say goodbye to Cassian Andor. Going by what he has built in Mexico over the past twenty years, the goodbye is only to the character.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Diego Luna is Before Night Falls (2000); in all, 34 films and 3 TV shows over 26 years. They have worked as actor in 26, producer in 14, director in 4 and writer in 3. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), with 77 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 18 titles. The person they have worked with most is Gael García Bernal, on 13 films, among them Y tu mamá también and Casa de mi Padre.