Ewan McGregor on His Awareness for How Younger Fans Embraced the Star Wars Prequels, His Excitement for Planned Kenobi Series

Empire Online recently interviewed actor Ewan McGregor, who is slated to reprise his role as Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi for an upcoming live-action limited miniseries. McGregor shared his thoughts on the upcoming miniseries and how he’s more excited about returning to the role of Kenobi now than when he portrayed Kenobi in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Below are some highlights.

Ewan McGregor on his excitement for the Kenobi miniseries: “I’m more excited about doing this one than I was doing the second and third one that we did before. I’m just excited about working with Deborah Chow [director, who also directed episodes of The Mandalorian], and the storylines are going to be really good I think. I’m just excited to play him again. It’s been long enough since I played him before.”

McGregor on how the prequels were viewed by the older generation of fans: You know, our films weren’t much liked when they came out, by my generation who loved the first ones. I think people of our generation wanted to feel the way they’d felt when they saw those first three movies when they were kids, and George [Lucas] wanted to take our ones in a different direction, he had a different idea. It was tricky at the time, I remember. But now, all these years later, I’m really aware of what our films meant to the generation they were made for, the children of that time. They really like them. I’ve met people who, they mean a lot to them, those films, more so than the original three, and I’m like, ‘Are you kidding?’”

On how the new show will be filmed: “The first three [Star Wars films] I did were really at the very beginning of digital photography. We had a camera with an umbilical cord to a tent, it was like back to the beginning of movies where the camera didn’t move very much because there was so much hardware attached to it. Now we’re going to be able to really create stuff without swathes of green-screen and blue-screen, which becomes very tedious for the actor.”

The planned Kenobi series has not yet begun production, but it’s still currently in development for Disney+. It will depict Kenobi following the end of the prequels and before the events of the original trilogy, where Kenobi was played by the late Sir Alec Guinness.