Diego Luna Dropped From Narcos: Mexico For Season 3
Netflix announced today Narcos: Mexico has been renewed for a third season, however without its usual showrunner, or star Diego Luna.
Netflix announced today that Narcos: Mexico has been renewed for a third season. While the announcement is good news for fans of the Narcos spinoff, the show will return without its star Diego Luna or the Narcos: Mexico‘s showrunner from the first two seasons.
Diego Luna, who played drug cartel leader Félix Gallardo, ended Season Two behind bars, making his return for a potential third season an uncertainty. Yet it seems as though Gallardo will stay behind bars and unseen for the present.
In addition to Diego Luna’s absence, Narcos: Mexico is also losing its showrunner, Eric Newman, who ran Narcos for three seasons from 2015-2017, and Narcos: Mexico’s first two seasons. Newman will still be an executive producer on the show, while the series co-creator Carlo Bernard will take over as showrunner. Bernard has also written the screenplays for 2019’s The Uninvited 2010’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Matt Damon’s 2016 film, The Great Wall.
According to Deadline, Newman will soon have an even larger presence at Netflix, due to an overall deal he has with the streaming service. Newman has produced such Netflix films as Bright and Project Power, as well as series like Hemlock Grove and Diego Luna’s Narcos: Mexico. His upcoming projects include the Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller-starring Escape From Spiderhead, Daniel Kaluuya’s The Upper World, and a new drama series about opioids, entitled Painkiller.
In a statement made about Diego Luna and Eric Newman’s leaving, Newman said that Carlo Bernard is the first person he ever talked with about the Narcos project over a decade ago and that he sees the future for Narcos: Mexico to be in “very capable hands.”
While Diego Luna and Eric Newman won’t be returning for Season Three of Narcos: Mexico, most of the cast will be returning for the upcoming season. Already confirmed for Season Three are cast members Alberto Ammann, Alfonso Dosal, Alejandro Edda (The Last of Us: Part II), Mayra Hermosillo, Gorka Lasaosa, Manuel Masalva, Scott McNairy (Halt and Catch Fire), and José Maria Yazpik (I’m So Excited!).
Although it’s not stated why Diego Luna won’t be returning for Narcos: Mexico Season Three, the actor is reprising his Rogue One character Captain Cassian Jeron Andor for a new Disney+ series based around the character. The series was announced in late 2018 and was planned to begin shooting in June 2020, but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In August, Luna said there was no rush in going back, and as of right now, there doesn’t seem to be a new date when filming is planned to begin.
Diego Luna isn’t the only character who will return for this as-of-yet untitled Cassian Andor series. The series, which will take place five years before the events of Rogue One, will feature the return of Alan Tudyk as droid K-2SO and Genevieve O’Reilly as Mon Mothma. The series has also cast quite a few new faces to the Star Wars universe, including Adria Arjona (Pacific Rim: Uprising), Denise Gough (The Kid Who Would Be King), Stellen Skarsgård (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest), and Kyle Soller (The Trip to Spain).
Beyond Narcos: Mexico and the upcoming Cassian Andor series, Diego Luna has quite a few projects currently in the works, which could explain why he can’t return for a third season. Luna is currently filming the voice of Krel Tarron for the upcoming 2021 animated film Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans. Also scheduled for release on December 11, 2020 is Wander Darkly, a new drama starring Luna, Sienna Miller, and Vanessa Bayer.
In recent years, Diego Luna has also voiced Krel Tarron for 2020’s Wizards: Tales of Arcadia, and most recently, he has been seen in Woody Allen’s 2019 film A Rainy Day in New York and the anthology film Berlin, I Love You, as well as appearing in Barry Jenkins’ 2018 film If Beale Street Could Talk, and in the 2017 Flatliners reboot.
It’s a shame that both Diego Luna and Eric Newman are not returning for Narcos: Mexico’s next season, yet it’s hard to not be excited for the intriguing new projects both have lined up.
