Apart from sparse hearsay, we don’t know a whole lot about the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi show on Disney Plus, though it’s been confirmed that it’ll take place sometime after Revenge of the Sith and see the Jedi Master in his years of exile on Tatooine.
Of course, fans have been waiting for a while to witness the return of Ewan McGregor in some capacity as the witty former general of the Grand Army. After all, the actor’s time in the Prequel Trilogy has turned him into an icon of that galaxy far, far away. It’s not just the charismatic and sassy demeanour that endears McGregor, though, but also the fact that Obi-Wan is essentially the ultimate mentor figure in Star Wars, even more so than Yoda.
And now that he’s much older and closer to the age of Ben Kenobi as we see him in the Original Trilogy, the Doctor Sleep star wants to imitate the late Alec Guinness as closely as possible, explaining the following in a recent interview:
“This time I’m much closer in age to him, and it will be my challenge to sort of meet him somewhere,” McGregor said. “I love Alec Guinness. I never got to meet him, but I love him through his work and it’s a great honor to try and pretend to be him.”
But it seems that the idea of studying the legendary actor and taking inspiration from his chops goes all the way back to the prequels when McGregor would even watch his older films.
“The fun thing about doing them in the first place, when I was much younger, was trying to imagine Alec Guinness, how he would play these streams as a younger guy,” he revealed. “It led me to watch a lot of his early work, which I hadn’t seen before. Brilliant movies, wonderful films he’d been in and I just had such a great time studying him in those movies.”
All in all, it seems that the team wants to capture the powerful essence of Guinness’ performance as Ben, which makes sense since chronologically speaking, the Obi-Wan Kenobi show is supposed to fill the 19-year gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, so far as the life of the old timer is concerned.
The series itself has gone through a rough patch over the past year, compelling Lucasfilm to delay it indefinitely and give the writers time to rework the script, but according to what McGregor has shared recently, the crew will pick up filming in just a couple of months.
