Discussing the current state of Star Wars, its future and the new architecture being created to allow it to grow beyond the Skywalker Saga, Kathleen Kennedy touched upon a wide variety of subjects, including the tricky topic of legacy characters, strongly indicating that Indiana Jones will likely never be recast, 2018’s Solo may have been a misstep and while explaining her point may have hammered a nail into the Lando series.
VF: You’ve mentioned a couple times that Star Wars is one unified story. That’s immense pressure. If Warner Bros. makes a Batman film that doesn’t work, they can reboot and do a different Batman film. But I don’t think you can really say, “The Obi-Wan series we made doesn’t count…”
KK: We also can’t go do something with Luke Skywalker that isn’t Mark Hamill. We’re not going to suddenly go try to do that. The beauty of Obi-Wan Kenobi is Ewan [McGregor] desperately wanted to do this. He has been so engaged in the entire process, and our excitement and reason for doing this is that the real Obi-Wan wanted to tell this story. We got excited by the idea that Ewan McGregor wanted to come back, and Hayden Christensen wanted to come back.
Just as fans, everybody inside the company was like, “Let’s see if we can make this work.” Deborah Chow’s done a beautiful job with it. Again, it’s a singular vision. She’s directed all six [episodes]. It has a consistent feel and style to it.
VF: I don’t want to put you in an awkward spot, but was this an understanding you’ve come to that was developed from Solo? I don’t want to trash Alden [Ehrenreich], I think he did a good job. But the idea that you can’t really replace Luke Skywalker, was that something you learned from that movie—or how would you put it?
Maybe. As you say it, Anthony…maybe. I think back, and Solo was one of the first ideas that came up when the company was sold. One of the first people I went to was [screenwriter] Larry Kasdan. Larry and I have known each other forever. He was so excited to tell that story. We genuinely believed at the time it was a good idea.
So yeah. There should be moments along the way when you learn things. That may have certainly been a learning moment. Some people have talked about how, well, maybe Solo should have been a TV show. But even doing Solo as a TV show without Harrison Ford as Han Solo…it’s the same thinking. Maybe I should have recognized this before. We would never make Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford. Having just finished the fifth movie, I can tell you, there wasn’t a day I wasn’t on set where I wasn’t like, Yes—this is Indiana Jones.
Maybe I’m closer to the DNA of Indy, and always have been, than I was when I came into Star Wars, because now it does seem so abundantly clear that we can’t do that. You get excited by these things, and you want to revisit things you want. You want to have that feeling again, and you’re trying to resurrect that. I think that’s what we do even with our new characters. With Star Wars, everybody talks about a “feeling” they have about Star Wars. That’s that intangible idea that you’re looking for.
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