The promotional period is in high gear for Obi-Wan Kenobi. In a recent chat with Empire, Ewan McGregor talks Obi-Wan Kenobi and how he got involved. McGregor goes on to say he loved being back in the role. To be fair this interview (via SWNN) is rather lengthy, so I won’t pre-amble too much and just get into the quotes.
Getting Started
“I’m excited about [people seeing Obi-Wan Kenobi]. My whole experience of the series has been really good, right from when I started speaking to Disney years ago. They called me in because every interview I did, I was being asked two things — would I do a sequel to Trainspotting, and would I play Obi-Wan Kenobi again? I would start saying ‘yeah, I think there’s a story between Episode III and Episode IV.‘ I was asked so much that Disney got me in and said ‘Do you mean it? Because we might do it.’ And I went ‘Yeah!’.
“From that moment on, it’s been a really positive experience. I was a producer on it, and I was loosely involved in notes and different drafts and story ideas and such. And that was very satisfying.”
Becoming A Disney+ Show
As most fans/readers will now, Obi-Wan Kenobi began life as a movie idea. McGregor talks about how that changed and progressed once Deborah Chow took over directing duties. The actor also praised Chow’s depth of knowledge on the Star Wars Universe.
“It went through several different iterations. We were talking about it being a movie. I said ‘I think it could be a story about a man who’s broken and lost his faith, and it could be quite dark. How does he get it back?’ That’s where we started. Taking somebody we know is an example of what the Jedi stand for, somebody who’s on the Jedi Council and is respected, to take them to a place where we’ve never seen them before — he’s guilt-ridden that he’s lost Anakin to the dark side, all his close spiritual friends, Yoda, everyone’s gone into hiding. So he’s lost.”
“Stephen Daldry was going to direct for a time [but he] was attached to direct a big movie and he just couldn’t do it. Then Deborah Chow became the director, and she took the project in two different directions, because it became a series, and then the storyline shifted. She’s got an amazing, depth of understanding of that world. I don’t know if it’s because of her work with The Mandalorian, but she really knows the world inside out. It’s very broad now with the animations and the video games. I don’t know what happened in Episode 29 of The Clone Wars, but she does.”
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Fans want to know a little of what to expect from Kenobi in the show and McGregor teased the following.
“We get to see Obi-Wan without his power. He’s out of the game, he’s totally rusty at the beginning. And he has to make the decision of whether he’s going to try and get back to where he has, or not.”
Darth Vader
McGregor then went on to discuss working with a certain Mr. Christensen again after all this time.
“We spent so much time together in Australia, because we shot Episode II and Episode III [there]. We were far away from home, and he was so young and passionate. He had a lovely relationship with my little — now 26-year-old — daughter Clara. I was so happy to see him again. When I knew we wanted to have him in the series, we met in a park in Santa Mónica and we went for a long walk. It was during lockdown. We were outdoors with our masks, I got to see his eyes only. We walked, we caught up on our lives, we hadn’t seen each other for a long, long time.”
“On set, it was like walking back in time. I was looking across at him playing these scenes, and it was like a time warp or something — like the last 20 years didn’t really happen. All of my personal feelings — because I love Hayden — were there, but also all of Obi-Wan’s feelings about Anakin were there, and it was pretty seamless.”
“It’s funny, both playing Renton again [McGregor’s character in Trainspotting], and playing Obi-Wan again, how it feels like those characters have existed somewhere in your brain, even though you don’t know you’re gonna play them again. When you come back to them, they’re the right age somehow. They come out like they’ve existed for the last 20 years somewhere. And it’s because they are a part of you. A lot has happened to me in my life since I last played Obi-Wan. That’s all my part and parcel of it somehow; it gets muddled together.”
Fight?
As for whether the pair will once again square off in Obi-Wan Kenobi?
“We had a great experience working together in the prequels, doing the fight stuff. I’m not gonna talk too much about anything that Hayden and I might or might not do in the fight world. It might be that we continue some of that in this one… We’ll see. I had a lot of fight stuff to do in this series, and in different ways — not necessarily always with the lightsaber.”
I am extremely hyped for Obi-Wan Kenobi and yet I’m also slightly worried this doesn’t land. There is a great opportunity here to give us a true bridge between the prequel and the originals. For someone like me who struggled with the prequels, I am hoping for a sort of redemption for these characters. However there’s no guarantee I will be satisfied and ultimately there is not a lot of room within canon for this show to play out. It’s a tightrope. However, I genuinely hope Lucasfilm pulls this off. If they do, this could become essential viewing for an old school Star Wars fan like me.
What are your thoughts as Ewan McGregor talks Obi-Wan Kenobi? As always, leave any thoughts below or on Discord.
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