First Openly Gay Showrunner Takes Lead on New Star Wars Series

Leslye Headland is an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. She is known for the play and 2012 film Bachelorette and 2015 film Sleeping with Other People. She co-created the Netflix series Russian Doll along with Natasha Lyonne and Amy Poehler.

Headland will serve as a writer, executive producer, and showrunner on a forthcoming Star Wars series on Disney+, making her the first openly LGBTQ person—and the second woman—to call the shots on a live-action project in the franchise.

Headland’s show, an untitled, Disney+ Star Wars series about Obi-Wan Kenobi, is set to shoot in 2021. She follows in the footsteps of Deborah Chow, who directed The Mandalorian, Disney’s successful first stab at serializing George Lucas’s iconic sci-fi ’verse.

News of Headland’s groundbreaking gig broke in May, but in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, the writer-showrunner got real about being a gay woman in Hollywood.

“The hardest part is getting in the room,” Headland confessed on the magazine’s Untold Stories podcast when asked about her career.

It’s something Headland hopes to do more of, she added:

The real joy is when I read a young woman’s script, or a young woman of color’s script, or a young LGBTQ writer and say, “Oh my God, this is great. This is great. I’m going to send this off to this person. You know who I know would love this? It is so and so. I’m going to send that to that person.” I don’t say that in an altruistic way, or ‘yay me,’ or I’m a good person. I’m saying that actually makes me happy.

The Star Wars fan community is at odds when it comes to this new project, not because the showrunner is a queer-identifying woman, but because there are rumors that this show will break the series original cannon.

There’s still very little information on what the series will actually entail, but it is rumored to take place in an alternate timeline from the original movies and feature female leads.