Ewan McGregor has been interviewed by Seth Abramovitch for The Hollywood Reporter and he speaks about his career so far, and reviving the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi for a Disney+ event series. Here is an excerpt….
McGregor’s first taste of Star Wars was a very personal one. His uncle is Denis Lawson, a Scottish actor who played Wedge Antilles — the only X-wing fighter besides Luke Skywalker to survive the original trilogy. He still remembers being a young boy and seeing his uncle firing away at the Death Star on the big screen.
Years later, Lawson advised McGregor against taking the part of Obi-Wan Kenobi — he resented that his own part in Star Wars ended up overshadowing the rest of his career — but “the closer I got to it,” McGregor explains, “the more I wanted to do it.”
But what began as a star fantasy evolved over a number of years into an actor’s nightmare. With each successive and underwhelming prequel release, director George Lucas employed more and more CGI, “because George loves technology and loves pushing into that realm,” McGregor explains. “He wanted more and more control over what we see in the background.” By Revenge of the Sith, physical sets and backdrops had almost entirely been replaced by bluescreens. “After three or four months of that, it just gets really tedious — especially when the scenes are … I don’t want to be rude, but it’s not Shakespeare,” he continues. “There’s not something to dig into in the dialogue that can satisfy you when there’s no environment there. It was quite hard to do.”
That won’t be a problem on the set of Obi-Wan Kenobi, where, as pioneered by creator Jon Favreau on The Mandalorian in a process called StageCraft, “they project [the virtual backgrounds] onto this massive LED screen. So if you’re in a desert, you’re standing in the middle of a desert. If you’re in the snow, you’re surrounded by snow. And if you’re in a cockpit of a starfighter, you’re in space. It’s going to feel so much more real.”
McGregor had been in talks to reprise the character in some form for the past seven years. It was originally going to be a feature film, until 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story underperformed and Disney and Lucasfilm pivoted to streaming. But until the project was announced in August 2019, McGregor was sworn to secrecy. “I’d see stuff on social media like, ‘They better cast Ewan as Obi-Wan,’ and I wasn’t able to say anything,” he says. “But it was pretty humiliating to think that [Disney] might be thinking about casting someone else.”
They weren’t, of course, as McGregor is now almost as much associated with Obi-Wan as the late Alec Guinness, who played him in the original trilogy. (The prequels have grown in admiration in the intervening years, particularly among the millennials who grew up with them.) All six episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi will be penned by Hossein Amini (screenwriter of the 2011 Ryan Gosling film Drive) and helmed by Deborah Chow, a Canadian who directed two episodes of Mandalorian. And it has already been announced — to much fan delirium — that the first season will feature the return of Hayden Christensen as young Darth Vader.
While principal photography has not yet commenced, McGregor says he “has done some screen tests with Deborah and other people, and I can see that she is a really, really good director.” Might some of those screen tests be with a young Luke Skywalker? He flashes that famous Ewan McGregor grin. “That’s very possible,” he says. “I don’t know.”
Read the interview here, or in the April 28th issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Main Photo by Harper Smith.
