According to the latest reports doing the rounds on the internet, Ewan McGregor, who played the wise and youthful version of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels after inheriting the character from veteran actor Alec Guinness, is making a return to his most famous role in a Disney Plus show centering around the Jedi master.
McGregor is reportedly in the final stages of sealing the deal with Disney, even though there’s been no official statement from the Mouse House or the actor himself. What we do have, however, is a history of McGregor’s remarks about his Star Wars stint during various talk shows and interviews, and based on those statements, some fans believe that returning to the franchise isn’t something that he’s particularly interested in doing.
Here’s what the actor said in a 2014 interview:
“I’ve never been to one of the conventions. The people I meet are the f_____s who want me to sign Star Wars photos so they can sell them on the Internet or the people at premieres who are crushing children against barriers to get me to sign their f_____g picture of Obi-Wan Kenobi. They’re not fans—they’re parasitical lowlifes and f_____g w_____s.”
If those remarks leave any doubt, there was also that other time McGregor described himself as the following:
“This urban, grungy actor doing films about heroin and stuff, and that’s who I felt like I really was,”
As fans will know, Ewan rose to prominence with his leading role in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, a dark, gritty look at drug problems among the youth of Britain. And it seems those are the type of projects that he feels most comfortable with. Certainly, waving a lightsaber and talking about the code of the Jedi is a far cry from the kind of stuff that McGregor’s interested in doing.
So, it seems that if the actor’s been convinced to return to the Star Wars franchise as Obi-Wan Kenobi and for a streaming show instead of a movie, he’ll be looking for a big enough paycheck to make it worth his time to once again put on that Jedi cloak, holster that lightsaber and face the horde of Star Wars fanatics that he seems to have such a deep distaste for.
