Darth Vader isn’t as “fully formed” in Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi

Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi is the next of Disney’s live-action Star Wars shows on the docket. This one will be about, no surprise, Obi-Wan Kenobi, who we will catch up with after the events of Revenge of the Sith but before he meets an adult Luke in A New Hope. The Jedi order has fallen and Obi-Wan is living in exile on Tatooine; it’s a rough time for him.

Obi-Wan will once again be played by Ewan McGregor, who played him in the Star Wars prequel movies. Perhaps even more surprising, McGregor’s prequel castmate Hayden Christensen will be returning to once again play Darth Vader.

Now, the show didn’t have to include Darth Vader, and apparently there were lots of debates about it among the producers, but according to director Deborah Chow, it would have been difficult to tell this story with him. “[F]or me, the starting place of character is you just start and you look at who has been important to him in his life,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “And it’s quite hard to avoid Anakin/Vader in that scenario, especially coming out of Revenge of the Sith.”

"So really it came out of an evolution of the character for me. It wasn’t just to sort of bring him back. It was really like, who means something and where are we at this point in the timeline with Vader?"

Fair enough. But now that Vader is back, what kind of Vader will he be?

Seeing Darth Vader onscreen again is “significant”

“The first time I saw [Christensen] in costume and the full thing going, he’s towering over me,” Chow remembered. “He’s like literally almost twice my size, it felt like. It’s really intense to have such an iconic character, and then to be directing him and to be doing new scenes with him. So I do remember poor Ewan on that day, he’s like, ‘What am I, chopped liver by comparison right now?'”

"But I know that for Vader, it’s something that it’s almost part of our consciousness, because we’ve all had it in our lives for so long that to actually see him on set, it’s pretty sort of significant. It’s kind of moving."

Darth Vader is indeed one of the most iconic movie characters of all time, so you have to be careful how you use him. Like Obi-Wan, he’s in a bit of a transitionary period at the time of this new show. “So he isn’t the New Hope Vader quite yet, you know what I mean?” Chow said. “So we are with the character sort of in the middle of this period. It is still Vader obviously, but it’s a Vader that isn’t quite as fully formed as A New Hope.”

Does that mean we’ll get some of Vader being emotional while wearing the full suit? Anakin Skywalker did plenty of pining during the prequel trilogy, but when Vader is in that suit, we’re mostly used to him choking out guys with the Force and making evil puns. This could change the game.

Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi premieres on Disney+ on May 25.

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