Yesterday saw the global Obi-Wan Kenobi press conference take place, and Fantha Tracks were present to watch Ewan McGregor, Deborah Chow and Moses Ingram discuss the forthcoming Disney Plus series coming to the streamer on 27th May with two episodes. Clearly enthused, the three touched on a number of subjects, including the unlikely issue of Ewan McGregor forgetting how to do the Kenobi accent.
EWAN MCGREGOR: Yeah, we did a lot of lightsaber drills with JoJo and his team. And, yeah, it was something that you have to work on. It’s not, like, there right away. There’s two things I think I had to work on was that and his voice. Like, I — we did a casting, Deb and I did a casting with some — for two roles in this series that we wanted. So, we did sort of screen tests with different actors for those roles. And that was the first thing I did as OBI-WAN again since, you know, 2003. So, I arrived. We borrowed a bit of The Mandalorian stage on a Sunday when they were off and some of their crew and I walked into the dressing room and there was a sort of OBI-WAN-ish costume hanging up in the wardrobe that The Mandalorian’s wardrobe department had put together. And putting that on was just really crazy after all that time.
And then walking out onto the set was crazy because there’s so many Star Wars fans in the crew, like, which was a new experience for me. So, there was a sort of buzz about OBI-WAN walking back on stage, you know. But then when we came to do the actual scenes with these other actors, I was doing a sort of vague English accent and it wasn’t really OBI-WAN’s voice at all. And I was, oh dear. That’s not — that’s not very good. So, you know, luckily we had months before we actually started shooting. So, I went back and did some homework with Alec Guinness and what I’d done before in the original films. But those, I think, were the two things. Playing him felt totally like he’d always been there ready to come out any minute. But just his voice needed a bit of work.
