Ewan McGregor insists Obi-Wan Kenobi series will start shooting in March

After many delays, Ewan McGregor promises that his Obi-Wan Kenobi Star Wars series will start shooting in March.

Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more. Yes, we’ve heard it all before. Yes, there’s nothing to do but hear it again, and pray for its veracity. Ewan McGregor has claimed — nay, insisted — that his long-touted Disney+ series about Obi-Wan Kenobi will be filmed next March.

The show, which has been an apparent passion project of the Scottish actor for some time, has been delayed multiple times for a variety of reasons since its announcement last August. Firstly, the head writer, Hossein Amini (Drive), left the project, which prompted first a search for a replacement — found in Joby Harold (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword) — and then a thorough rewrite. Then the pandemic struck, and production across the land was halted.

This led to some rumors that the series — which will be set after Revenge of the Sith but before A New Hope, during Kenobi’s exile on Tatooine — was dead, something McGregor has frequently dismissed. Speaking to Variety in April, he declared the shoot would begin “early next year as opposed to summer this year,” and he’ll have you know things are shaping up nicely. “I think the scripts are great,” he said. “They’re in really good shape. They want them to be better. I think we keep our same airdate. All good.”

And now, in a chat on The Graham Norton Show, he firmed up the details. “We start shooting it in March next year.”

Of course, McGregor couldn’t reveal that much about the project. “It’s the Obi-Wan Kenobi story, I suppose,” he said, helpfully. “It’s not all me, but it certainly will be a lot of me, which is good.”

McGregor also talked about the last man to play Obi-Wan Kenobi, Alec Guinness. “The fun thing about doing that in the first place when I was much younger was trying to imagine Alec Guinness, how would he play these scenes as a younger guy? It led me to watch some of his earlier work, which I had never seen before. Brilliant movies, wonderful films that he’d been in, and I had such a great time studying him in those movies.”

Guinness was in his 60s when he made Star Wars, while McGregor is about to turn 50. The timelines match up just about perfectly.

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