Reticent to take on the role until he had a chat with his uncle Denis Lawson, Ewan McGregor not only became the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the prequel trilogy but he made the role his own. A decade and a half later he returned to the role, and almost half a decade after that first season, Ewan is making it clear – very clear – that he would relish a return to the role, especially now as he approaches the age Sir Alec Guinness was when he played the role (nabbing an Academy Award Nomination for Best Supporting Actor in the process) in the 1977 original.
The job of an actor in those films is a very different one than The Pillow Book or something, when you’re really trying to discover someone’s emotional life. It’s different. So, I did them, and I enjoyed them, and they were not well received. And so that was weird and hard — to sort of put yourself into something like that, and then for them to be really dragged through the month by the critics. But I learned a lot about not giving a sh*t.”
McGregor, however, was pleasantly surprised, many years later, to find out that there actually is a passionate fanbase out there for his three Star Wars movies. “The truth is, I didn’t know that when we made the series [Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi]. I found that out later when they premiered the series. They showed it at a Star Wars convention in California. And I’d never been to one. I never went to conventions, or anything like that. But then when we went to the premiere, they played the first two episodes. I had many thousands of people behind me, and I felt a rush there. When I started signing autographs, I started meeting people who we made those films for: They were children when we made them. And then I started realizing that [those films] were loved.”
The actor still thinks fondly of Obi-Wan, partly because he is now getting closer to the age Alec Guinness was when he played the part in the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope. “He was in his 60s when he played that role, where I was doing it when I was 25, 26 or something like that. It was hard to make that work. But when I went back, I was in my late 40s.”
“I’d really like to do it again,” he added, “because at the end of the original series, me and Liam [Neeson] just wander off. There’s got to be a great story, or maybe two, or maybe three.” He laughed. “Or a series…”