Ewan McGregor is painting a picture of what fans can expect from the new series he stars in, Obi-Wan Kenobi, including comparing it to a long movie split up into episodes.
The Disney Plus series releasing next week, and set within the Star Wars universe, sees the legendary Jedi Master in hiding on Tatooine. It takes place after he took “the high ground” and bisected his former apprentice, Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith, and before Kenobi became “Old Ben” in A New Hope, as portrayed by Alec Guinness in the original film that kicked off the franchise.
During a virtual press conference in promotion of Obi-Wan Kenobi, McGregor discussed how different it was for him to film the new show as compared to when he last worked on the franchise in the mid-2000s, due in no small part to the technological advancements such as the development of StageCraft for The Mandalorian.
However, McGregor stopped short of saying the experience of filming Obi-Wan Kenobi was different merely because it was a TV show.
“The beauty of it being a series is that we’ve got longer to tell the story. But because [Deborah Chow] directed [all the episodes] and it’s her singular vision throughout, it did feel like we were making one movie. And the episodic nature of our series, it falls really cleverly in the storyline, but it is one driving narrative.”
While McGregor said he believed The Mandalorian “feels more episodic,” suiting the storytelling style of that show, Obi-Wan Kenobi, by contrast, “is like a movie that just happens to be split up into these episodes.”
Unlike the prequel movies, which largely relied on green screens for their special effects, Obi-Wan Kenobi utilized StageCraft, a cutting-edge technology that displays real-time computer-generated imagery renders on a series of LED screens, better immersing performers in the scene. The technology was developed for The Mandalorian and director Deborah Chow first became familiar with it while working on that show, she explained during that same virtual press conference.
Obi-Wan Kenobi comes to Disney Plus on May 27.
