When the Star Wars prequel movies started coming out way back in the late ’90s, they were divisive. If Twitter had been around back then, fans would have been tearing these movies a new a**hole every minute of every day. Even without Twitter, they made their displeasure known.
But time passes, wounds heal, and the prequels have aged very well, with the kids who were raised on these movies growing up and looking back on them fondly. And now, hype is high for Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi, a new Disney+ series that will see Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen return to their prequel roles as Obi-Wan and Darth Vader.
“There’s something very nice about doing work that you know people are going to see,” McGregor told Entertainment Weekly, proving how much the narrative around these films has changed over the years. “I’ve spent a lot of time in my career making films that very few people ever saw, and there’s something nice about going to work when you know this has already got its audience.”
"It sounds a bit pretentious, but it’s nice to make people happy. It’s nice to know that by all of our efforts in making this Obi-Wan Kenobi series, the fans are going to be stoked. I think they’re not going to be disappointed by it. Maybe some will, but you can’t please all the people all the time. But knowing that people are going to be happy because of our work is a nice feeling."
Obi-Wan Kenobi has “given up” on his new Star Wars show
We shouldn’t speak too soon, of course; it’s possible the series won’t go over well, although it sounds like the team has taken their time to get it right.
“I always felt that there must be a good story to tell between Episode III and IV, and we spent a lot of time and energy finding that story,” McGregor said. “And I think we did a great job. I have to say, I think Deborah Chow is a brilliant director and we’re lucky to have her direct all of the episodes. So it really is her vision. It’s one person’s vision from start to finish. We don’t have different directors coming in and out. And she worked tirelessly with the writers to find this brilliant story. And I think it’s just going to make us understand him more from where we left him in Episode III to where we find him with Alec Guinness in Episode IV.”
There’s lots of drama teed up, as well, like the much ballyhooed moment in the trailer where Obi-Wan insists that young Luke Skywalker must be trained in the ways of the Force, and his Uncle Owen (Joel Edgerton) points out how badly things turned out for the last guy Obi-Wan trained.
“I think Owen feels like Obi-Wan only cares about the boy because he may show signs of the Force,” McGregor said. “And he knows that Obi-Wan is pretty single-minded about that, and if it seems that Luke Skywalker shows that he has the Force, that Obi-Wan would want to train him to be a Jedi. And especially at this time when the Jedi are all but wiped out.”
"Playing him, I was split about this because I feel there’s part of Obi-Wan who’s given up, you know? That he feels like the time of the Jedi is over, that they lost. And whether he really feels that, he sort of says it. He feels that it’s done. They lost the battle.And I think Owen wants Luke Skywalker to have a normal childhood, to grow up in an ordinary way and not to be bothered by that. And also, there’s the risk that, knowing that the Jedi are being hunted down, if Obi-Wan is found out and discovered, then [Owen] doesn’t want him anywhere near Luke Skywalker because they would also take Luke."
Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi premieres this Friday, May 27 on Disney+. They’re dropping the first two episodes at once!
Ewan McGregor wants a second season of Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi
So far, we’ve heard that Obi-Wan Kenobi is a one-time limited series…but given how sequel-happy Disney is, we wouldn’t be shocked at all if it somehow continued.
EW is already all in on a second season, and did its best to get the producers to say they wanted one. Director Deborah Chow shot them down. “It was definitely conceived as a limited series and it is one big story with a beginning, middle, and end. So that’s the way we’ve always approached it,” she said. “The approach has always been that it is one full story.”
Yeeeeah, but this is Disney; if there’s an appetite for a sequel, they’ll make it, right? Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy seems to be taking that approach. “It’s certainly something we talk about,” she said. “Mainly because everybody came together and had such an incredible time. Ewan had an incredible time. Hayden had an incredible time. So certainly from that point of view, everybody involved would love to see this not end. But we have to really spend our time asking the question: Why would we do it? If we were to decide to do anything more with the Obi-Wan character, we’d have to really answer the question why?”
McGregor himself was more direct. “Yeah, I would like to make another one,” he said.
"I had such a great time working with Deb, and the actors that we had in this were so great to work with, and the crew are just… I can’t tell you. It was so wonderful to work on. I couldn’t wait to get to work every day, and on a long shoot like this, that’s something. Right to the end, I just loved the experience of it."
We’ll find out if this thing has legs soon enough.
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