Obi-Wan Kenobi, the upcoming Star Wars miniseries starring Ewan McGregor that's set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, has left fans waiting with excitement. What happened to Obi-Wan Kenobi after the events of the Clone Wars and while he was in exile was a fertile field ripe with storytelling potential.
Nobody has proven a bigger fan of Obi-Wan Kenobi than McGregor himself, who’s now played the titular Star Wars character more times than Alec Guinness himself (and put in more minutes doing it so far). It was working on the new series, though, that the actor found himself actually scared for the first time in his acting career.
Seeing Darth Vader on set for the first time put McGregor right back into his childhood all over again (Colin Farrell had a similar reaction to seeing Robert Pattinson in The Batman for the first time). Though he had acted alongside Hayden Christensen for years, McGregor had never been face-to-face with Darth Vader before. Unlike Alec Guinness, whose very first at-bat in the role saw him facing down Darth Vader aboard the Death Star, there’d been no such interaction with his version of Obi-Wan to date. "I’ve never met Darth Vader," he said in a recent interview with Total Film magazine. "I had rehearsed the scene with Vader, but not with the helmet on or anything like that. When we came to do the scene, when they shouted 'action,' he had to come from behind me. I turned around, and fucking Darth Vader was coming at me. It was like I was six again. I’d never acted into Vader’s helmet. I’d never looked him in the eye.”
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He went on to say he had a similarly visceral reaction to facing Stormtroopers for the first time (since, despite acting opposite Clone Troopers, those were CGI). He said it’s a different thing to face someone actually in armor, aiming a blaster at you. “It’s like actual childhood memories of being scared. That’s how deeply it’s in us. I’ve acted for 30 years, and I’ve never been genuinely frightened when I’m acting frightened... But I had moments on this that were genuinely quite scary. It’s so funny.”
Set on Tatooine during Obi-Wan Kenobi's exile, the series will let viewers in on what was happening in Obi-Wan's life before he got that fateful message from Princess Leia relayed through Artoo. Presumably doing things other than being the David Attenborough of Tatooine and figuring out that Tusken Raiders travel single-file, casting actors like Christensen as Darth Vader lets fans in on how Obi-Wan's life away from the Galactic core proved no less hectic than his heyday during the waning Republic.
While Obi-Wan Kenobi will feature many villains for McGregor to face down, it took the true classics like Vader and Stormtroopers to bring the actor back to his childhood all over again.
Obi-Wan Kenobi will premiere on Disney Plus on May 27, 2022.
Source: Games Radar