Speaking to EW in an interview conducted prior to the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike, Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Hera Syndulla in Ahsoka) spoke about how the son she shares with actor Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi) is obsessed with Grogu.
Winstead is married to another Star Wars legend, Ewan McGregor, who is most famously known for playing Obi-Wan Kenobi, and they recently had a kid together.
The actress explains that long before she was cast as Hera, she would often visit McGregor on the set of his own recent Disney+ show, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
“I remember coming in with our little newborn boy,” Winstead, 38, says. “Once he was ready to be out in the world, that was one of the first places he ever went to, the Obi-Wan set. So, he has definitely become familiar with the Star Wars world, even if he doesn’t fully understand it yet. He’s got Star Wars friends all over the place — like Grogu dolls everywhere that he’s obsessed with. It’s been a part of our lives for a while now.”
In fact, Winstead suspects that it was those visits to the Obi-Wan set — and her conversations with Obi-Wan director Deborah Chow — that helped land her a role in Ahsoka. “I think there was an influence there,” Winstead says. “I got to know Deb from being around the Obi-Wan set, and I think she was sort of poking Dave [Filoni] and Jon [Favreau], going, ‘Hey! She’d be a really good Hera!'”
Now that her and McGregor’s son Laurie is 2, Winstead says he’s got lots of Star Wars gifts and action figures “peppered around” the house. (She jokes that she never intended for her son’s closet to include so many Star Wars T-shirts, but it “sort of naturally just happened.”)
“In terms of our son’s favorite toys, he’s got his Grogu,” Winstead adds. “He’s got Lola from the Obi-Wan series. There’s a lot of Dadas around from various different eras of Obi-Wan. If he sees any sort of Obi-Wan figure around, that’s Dada. That’s what he knows it as right now.”
Read more at the link below and watch Ahsoka exclusively on Disney+.
