Star Wars: New Disney+ Showrunner Leslye Headland Teased Her Ideas at the Rise of Skywalker Premiere

The Star Wars franchise got a pretty welcome update on Wednesday, when news broke that Russian Doll showrunner Leslye Headland is working on a new series set in the franchise for Disney+. Headland, whose work also includes Terriers, Bachelorette, and Sleeping With Other People, will be writing and showrunning this new series, which will be focused on female characters. While details are relatively slim beyond that, it sounds like Headland has been coming up with ideas for the Star Wars universe for a while. In an interview with Variety at last year’s premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Headland was asked if she would be interested in writing her own Star Wars movie, to which she responded pretty enthusiastically.

“Oh, please. Please, queen Kathleen Kennedy,” Headland said, before being asked if she had ideas in mind for a Star Wars story. “Oh yes. Oh my gosh, yeah. I think I’ve had ideas for Star Wars movies since I was thirteen years old? Maybe eight years old?”

As Headland also revealed during the interview, she has a very all-encompassing relationship to the galaxy far, far away.

“I’m the type of Star Wars fan that doesn’t even have a favorite movie. I just want to live in the universe of Star Wars, continually, in perpetuity, forever. So when people are like ‘What’s your favorite Star Wars movie?’ I’m like ‘There is no Star Wars movie. There is only Star Wars.’”

Headland will be the first woman to write a Star Wars project in decades, after Leigh Brackett co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back back in 1980. The currently-untitled series is believed to be a female-driven action thriller, which will contain martial arts elements and be set in a separate point in time from the main Star Wars canon.

Headland’s series is the fourth live-action Star Wars project to come to Disney+, kicking off with The Mandalorian, which has reportedly already been renewed for a third season. There are also spinoff series involving the prequel trilogy’s Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story‘s Cassian Andor (Diego Luna).

Are you excited to see Headland’s Star Wars series come to life? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!