Ewan McGregor Reflects on Star Wars Prequel Hate, Is Excited for Obi-Wan Miniseries

4 months ago 1 second ago

Ewan McGregor commented on the Star Wars prequel reception in a new interview. He also talked about his excitement for the highly anticipated Obi-Wan Kenobi series, which he believes will start production in the spring. When looking back at the prequels, a lot has changed over the years in terms of how fans view them, which is something that McGregor knows all too well. He explains.

“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?'”

RELATED: Ahsoka Tano to Be Joined by More Clone Wars Characters in The Mandalorian Season 2?

As for returning to play the Jedi master, Ewan McGregor couldn’t be more excited. “I’m more excited about doing this one than I was doing the second and third one that we did before,” he says. “I’m just excited about working with Deborah Chow 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.” Star Wars fans were beyond excited to learn that McGregor was going to star in an Obi-Wan Kenobi limited series for Disney+ when it was announced in 2019.

When delving deeper into his excitement for the Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney+ series, Ewan McGregor went back to making the prequels. “The first three [Star Wars movies] I did were really at the very beginning of digital photography,” the actor says. “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.” Digital photography has come a long way since the prequel days. “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 Obi-Wan Kenobi series will utilize the same Unreal Game Engine environment that Jon Favreau introduced on The Mandalorian. The technology is a gamechanger for Hollywood and more projects are about to adopt it, possibly even including Thor: Love and Thunder. It has been heavily rumored that Taika Waititi will be going back to the format in order to introduce it to Marvel Studios when working on the sequel.

The Mandalorian season 2 is all set to premiere at the end of October and Star Wars fans are looking forward to seeing where Mando and Baby Yoda go this time. The Obi-Wan Kenobi series, along with the Rogue One Prequel series are also on the way, so there is a lot to be excited about on the TV side of things. You can check out the rest of the interview with Ewan McGregor over at Empire.

Topics: Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi

Writer for Movieweb since 2017. Enjoys playing Catan when not writing about superheroes and Star Wars.

---