As part of a new feature piece in The Hollywood Reporter, actor Ewan McGregor sat down to reflect on his career and discuss his prep for returning to the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi over twenty years after he first played it.
Shooting on the new Obi-Wan series hasn’t begun, but he confirms he’s already been involved in “two-and-a-half-hour sessions of sword fights and hand-to-hand stuff”.
He was forced to take a break for a couple of days when the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine knocked him about, but he’s now back at it and hopes his return will be different.
He acknowledges that the “Star Wars” prequel trilogy reception was hard to accept: “That was quite difficult. They were universally not very much liked.” However the new series he’s much more confident about:
“I’m really excited about it. Maybe more so than the first ones, because I’m older – I just turned 50 – and I’m just in a much better place.”
Part of that is the technology. McGregor says he was frustrated at George Lucas’ love for technology and the heavy use of blue screen filmmaking:
“[George Lucas] wanted more and more control over what we see in the background. After three or four months of [being surrounded by blue screens], it just gets really tedious – especially when the scenes are… I don’t want to be rude, but it’s not Shakespeare. 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.”
McGregor isn’t so worried about the new series, praising the new StageCraft technology from “The Mandalorian” which is also being employed here:
“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.”
Asked if any Skywalkers, other than the confirmed return of Hayden Christensen as Darth Vader, could pop up he says: “That’s very possible. I don’t know.”.
The Obi-Wan Kenobi series is expected to arrive on Disney+ sometime in 2022.
