The time has finally come! Obi-Wan Kenobi is set to premiere on Friday, May 27, and in the lead up to the premiere, we got to join the virtual press conference for the series! Having Ewan McGregor back in Star Wars has been a huge thing for fans of both the franchise and his portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi in particular, but what has been so interesting about the lead up to the release of Obi-Wan Kenobi has been that he’s really opened up about his feelings after the prequels were released.
Not everyone was exactly kind about the prequels, and the way that Ewan McGregor continues to talk about it, he thought everyone hated them, but he has slowly started to learn how much people did love the movies. So, he spoke a bit about what brought him back to Obi-Wan Kenobi and how he got involved in the Disney+ series.
What brought him back
Devan Coggan from Entertainment Weekly moderated the press conference and started by asking what the process was like to come back to the role, and McGregor was very honest about bringing Obi-Wan back to life. “Well, it was a very long, slow process of coming back to playing him, I guess,” he said. “It was born of two things. I think, a) I was just asked a lot. The end of every interview I ever did for years I was asked two things: would I do the sequel to Trainspotting, and would I ever play Obi-Wan Kenobi again. It was always the last two questions as the publicist is poking her head around the door saying, ‘That’s the last question.’ And so, I just started answering it honestly, and I think I became more aware of the fondness that the generation that we made the prequels for have for those films.”
McGregor has been very vocal about how he felt after the prequels and how his feelings changed as he heard more and more people talking about their love for the movies. “Because when we made them, we didn’t hear that. We didn’t get that response, really. So, gradually, I started realizing that people really liked them and that they meant a lot to that generation. So, that made me—that warmed my feelings about them, I guess, or my experience of being in the Star Wars world. And then, Disney just asked me to come in one day for a meeting because they kept seeing on social media that I’m saying that I would play—I would like to play Obi-Wan Kenobi again.”
He joked a bit about how it all ended up looking like he was trying to get cast again. “It looked like I was sort of touting for work at Disney’s door,” McGregor said. “Like, you know, could you cast me? But anyway, they got me in and asked me if I mean it, and I said, yeah, just—I said I would love to play him again. I think there’s got to be a good story between Episode III and Episode IV and that’s what we definitely found, you know, after a lengthy process of exploring some different storylines. I think we’ve ended up a really, really a brilliant story and one that will satisfy the fans sitting between those two episodes.”
(featured image: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Disney)
