Tomorrow, Ewan McGregor returns as Obi-Wan Kenobi, who will be getting his own show on Disney+. Set years after the end of Revenge of the Sith but years before things start to look up in A New Hope, we find Obi-Wan living “in hiding and living a very sort of solitary life,” as McGregor told USA Today.
In Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Empire is ascendent, the Republic is no more and Obi-Wan is living in exile in a cave on the desert planet of Tatooine. You live like that for a while and see what it does to your head. “Sometimes it feels like he’s accepted that it’s over, that the Jedi Order is done and that the war was lost,” McGregor said. “And other times I feel like he’s still got hope in him.”
That hope must be stirring, because Obi-Wan will leave Tatooine at some point in the series, something we didn’t know he’d done before he meets up with an adult Luke in A New Hope. “He’s just going to watch over Luke the entire time?” director Deborah Chow asked. “That would get old pretty fast.”
It was “cathartic” for Hayden Christensen to play Anakin Skywalker again
It’s possible Obi-Wan will leave Tatooine because of his old padwan Anakin Skywalker, now known as Darth Vader. But he’s also in a transitionary period. “He’s not quite the New Hope Vader, and yet he’s not Anakin anymore,” Chow said.
The last time Obi-Wan saw Anakin, he left him for dead on the fiery planet of Mustafar, walking away as his body ignited. But even after everything Anakin did — turning to eh Dark Side, killing a bunch of children, helping topple the Republic, etc. — Obi-Wan still cares for him. “Obi-Wan loves Anakin, and he was his brother. It weighs so heavily on him that he lost him to the Dark Side and grieves for him, but at the same time he feels a sense of responsibility for that, and therefore a guilt that he didn’t stop it from happening,” McGregor said. “It’s quite complicated and quite heavy what he’s carrying in terms of his feelings for Anakin.”
Anakin/Vader will once again be played by Hayden Christensen, who like McGregor hasn’t been part of this universe for almost 20 years. “Then I got the call saying that Deborah Chow wanted to get together and talk about this Obi-Wan Kenobi show that she’s doing with Ewan, I was just thrilled,” he told IndieWire. “This is a character that means so much to me, and to get to come back and do more with it was just a thrilling opportunity.”
"Obviously, it brought up a lot of feelings of nostalgia but it was also very cathartic in a way too, just because this is a character that means so much to me and has really sort of stayed with me over the years."
We’ll get to see the result of all this work tomorrow, May 27, when the first two episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi drop on Disney+. “One of the things I was trying to do with this series was to have the legacy, and who is important in Obi-Wan’s life, and to also have some new characters,” Chow said. “So it’s going to be a mixture of the two. But I do think there are some surprises to come, I hope.”
Ahsoka and The Mandalorian season 3 will premiere in 2023
A lot of this information is coming out at the Star Wars Celebration, an annual event where Disney hypes up one of its biggest franchises. Just now, Disney announced that both the third season of The Mandalorian and the now show Ahsoka — starring Rosario Dawson as Anakin Skywalker’s former padawan — will be coming in 2023.
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