Obi-Wan Kenobi's Ewan McGregor on Jedi Master With a Blaster ('Times Have Changed'), Revisiting Movie Threads
Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, which premieres its first two episodes this Friday, finds its titular hero on the run from Force-sensitive agents of the Galactic Empire known as the Inquisitors, after being branded a traitor.
As the Jedi Master continues to evade those who aim to capture him, he’ll be forced to wield weapons that aren’t lightsabers, including a smaller version of the blaster he previously deemed “so uncivilized” in 2005’s Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.
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“Here I am with a blaster in my hand [in Obi-Wan Kenobi],” Ewan McGregor, who plays the fan-favorite character, tells TVLine. “Times have changed for ol’ Obi-Wan.”
The six-episode limited series takes place 10 years after the events of Revenge of the Sith, with Obi-Wan still wracked with guilt over losing his former apprentice Anakin Skywalker to the dark side. Hayden Christensen will reprise his role as Anakin/Darth Vader, setting the stage for a reunion between Obi-Wan and his former padawan, long before their final encounter in A New Hope.
“Bringing back Vader [is] obviously something you don’t want to do lightly, and you don’t want to do it just for the sake of doing it,” director Deborah Chow explains. “When we started really looking at Obi-Wan’s life and saying, ‘Who’s important in his life? What in his past has affected him?’ so much of that connects back to Anakin that it just felt very organic that it would be part of this series from where we’re coming out in the history.”
McGregor says, “It was very important that we got [it] right for the canon of Star Wars, that we that we don’t make any mistakes, but also that we tell a story that’s our own story. I think there are some threads that we saw between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope that will be very satisfying for the fans to see and recognize.”
Fans may also recognize the Grand Inquisitor (played in the live-action series by Homeland‘s Rupert Friend) and Fifth Brother (Sung Kang) from Star Wars Rebels. In the animated series, the Grand Inquisitor shows off impressive lightsaber skills such as twirling his weapon like a helicopter and practically flying with it. So, will we see those same skills on display in Obi-Wan Kenobi?
“All I can say is that it’s a lot easier to spin those lightsabers in animation than it is in live action,” Chow notes. “You’ve seen in the trailer already that we obviously did spin it, but we certainly tried to keep the spirit of the Inquisitors in place.”
The show will also introduce a new Inquisitor named Reva, played by The Queen’s Gambit‘s Moses Ingram.
“[The Inquisitors are] a team of people, but they all have their own way of doing things,” she shares. “The thing about [Reva] is she doesn’t care what anybody thinks about how she does it. She plays the offensive and she wants to be first, and she’s just passionate about what she does.”
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