You’d think being a bigStar Wars star would come with a few cool perks. But for Diego Luna, it almost came with an arrest record.
While making the rounds for Andor Season 2 and Star Wars events like Stat Wars Celebration and May the 4th, Luna stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live to chat about the upcoming season. But things took a hilarious left turn when Kimmel asked him what kind of Star Wars memorabilia he walked away with after filming wrapped.
Luna shared that he walked away with a blaster as a gift, and when he went to the airport with it, things got messy. The actor said:
“I went to the airport, and I said, ‘I’m gonna take it with me because if I send it down… And the work is so realistic. It’s so meticulously real – ‘real’ for a galaxy far, far away.
“I was stopped in security in Heathrow [Airport], and the guys unwrapped the [blaster], and they were like, ‘Whoa, what is that!?’ And I was trying to grab it to say, ‘No, it’s just a prop!’ And everyone [went], ‘No, no, no! Don’t touch it!’”
So there he is, hungover from a wrap party, looking suspiciously like someone who maybe shouldn’t be trying to get a weapon through security. He then added:
“And one guy recognizes me, but from Narcos, not from Star Wars. He’s like, ‘Whoa, wait a second!’ It was a mess, and I was hungover from the party, so I did look kind of broken, let’s put it that way.”
Luna found himself trying to convince airport security that this wasn’t an international incident in the making, that it was just a really well-made movie prop. And he had to pull out all the receipts.
“They asked me to go out, sign a letter, I had to show them in my phone pictures of the character, myself, grabbing the blaster. There’s even toys. They got it at the end. But in the kind of way that tells you it was a lot more painful than it sounds.
But, in the end, he got to keep the blaster, which is good! At least they didn’t take it away from him. Thast would’ve sucked.
