Why Gabriel Luna Axed His ‘Stock Answer’ To Playing Ghost Rider In MCU

Fresh off of HBO’s The Last of US and currently starring in Showtime’s Yellowjackets, Gabriel Luna’s career is skyrocketing. Now, the actor can also be seen in Netflix’s
NFLX
FUBAR, opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger, premiering May 25.

Luna’s performance as the Robbie Reyes iteration of Ghost Rider in season 4 of Marvel’s ABC series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (2013-2020) scored him loads of fans back in 2016. Although the show isn’t considered canon to the MCU, many Marvel fans have voiced that they’d love to see Luna reprise the role and usher in the MCU’s first Ghost Rider.

But is Gabriel up for it?

“Oh, I love that character. It was really special,” Luna told me. “It had only come into existence in 2014 (Robbie Reyes’ Ghost Rider), created by Felipe Smith, and then it was in 2016 that we did the show and literally not a day goes by that somebody doesn’t ask me about it.

“It feels like the demand may be there and if the creative is there and it makes sense… I think with Marvel right now, it’s so intricately woven that it would be a few years out if they started to think about it, to do the character. I’m always open.

“My stock answer used to be, ‘I loved what we did, I’m very happy with what we accomplished and I can be happy leaving it on the shelf and admiring what we did and have the audience remember it fondly, the way they do. To do the character again just gives me another opportunity to screw it up.’

“So there’s that mindset, but now I feel that I’m a lot more open should it come around. If it makes sense, I’m more than happy to… I try to keep myself in shape, Arnold (Schwarzenegger) demands it. So I’m still certainly physically capable of doing it and if it’s a great story and they’d have me, of course.”

One of Luna’s triumphs in playing Reyes was in not being overwhelmed with the source material and finding the right balance of incorporating the comics into his approach to the character.

“With characters like Robbie, the Ghost Rider, and Tommy (Miller, The Last of Us), they’ve been established and I’ve been able to access the source material, fall in love with it in a lot of ways and sometimes when you love something that strongly, it may interrupt your process and what you’re trying to accomplish,” Gabriel said.

“I think it’s just important to balance it out, absolutely hit all the notes that you know are vital and are intricately part of the DNA of certain characters and then it’s naturally going to take its own shape if I’m just honest and myself there on the day.

“It’s important to honor what people love about certain things, what I love about it. And that kind of helps if you have a few of the blocks already laid, some of the foundation is already strong, I think it’s important to start building from there.”

Luna and Schwarzenegger didn’t have to build much of a foundation for their chemistry in FUBAR, which features Gabriel once again as the villain going head-to-head with the former governor and former terminator. The pair worked together in 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate.

In FUBAR, Arnold plays a CIA agent closing in on retirement only to unearth a family secret that requires him to stay in the field a bit longer than he anticipated. Like Terminator: Dark Fate, when he played the Rev-9, Luna was the antagonist to Arnold’s hero, this time as Boro.

“It’s never normal. There’s never a point where it becomes something you’re used to. Absolutely, like all of us, [I] grew up watching his movies,” stated Gabriel. “Probably saw Running Man early, I know Terminator 2 is a film my mother took me to see in the theater. Once you hit that 10, 11, 12 age, he was into his action comedy era, which became my favorite moment in his career, it was those films. Last Action Hero is one of my favorite films.

“As a child watching his films, there’s always an access point, there’s always a proxy for you. Be it John Connor, Alyssa Milano’s character in Commando, or the kid from Last Action Hero, or the little boy in Jingle All the Way, for that matter. There always seems to be a character that represents you up there.

“So you dream of having Arnold be your friend. He’s this massive historical figure who’s your buddy. Never dreaming it becomes a reality, but at some point in 2018 it did just that and we made the Terminator film, we became close friends and now we have this opportunity to do it again.

“Once again, not really getting along onscreen as well as we do off, but at least this time we’re not punching each other in the face for days on end, however much we may want to in the show. This time around it was really special in that we got to bring a lot of our true life relationship to the screen and got to be humans, humans with emotion that had issues with each other, which is not the case with terminators usually.”

Despite being an enormous fan of Arnold growing up, Gabriel was able to play it cool with the action star when he first met him for Dark Fate.

“Just being around him you’re going to get some great stories, there’ll be a little down time here and there… We spent a lot of time in Budapest together training. There was plenty of opportunity to go ahead and pick his brain, just ask questions you were curious about for all these years.

‘He’s also very open and very forthcoming with a lot of awesome behind-the-scenes kind of Hollywood stories. So I never really pressed it. I always thought the moment would arrive when certain secrets would be revealed. And just being around him, just being around him was enough.

“We’ve had four or five years now of friendship and we do a lot of charity work together and we hang out here in LA and so I’ve had tons of opportunity to hear from the horse’s mouth. Now, it’s kind of just bask in the surreality and absurdness of it all, that you get to call the governor, the great Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now it’s nice just to not feel the pressure to ask any questions, just have a bike ride to Gold’s Gym and get your pump and have breakfast and just be guys hanging out.”