OBI-WAN KENOBI
Streaming, Disney+
Not every actor is granted the opportunity to return to a role after 20 years – older, wiser and considerably richer in every sense of the word. But Scottish actor Ewan McGregor has done so twice – reprising his iconic role as Mark Renton in Danny Boyle’s T2 Trainspotting, and now revisiting his portrayal of Star Wars’ Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi in a six-episode event series.
Played by Sir Alec Guinness in the classic Star Wars trilogy, Obi-Wan Kenobi was the soul of the films, introducing viewers to George Lucas’ world and mentoring a young Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) to take on the Galactic Empire – Guinness earned what is still the franchise’s only Academy Award nomination for acting.
In the prequel trilogy, set decades earlier, McGregor was cast as Kenobi, a young Jedi taking on his first apprentice – Luke’s father Anakin (Hayden Christensen).
New series Obi-Wan Kenobi picks up 10 years after the events of Revenge of the Sith, a time when all Jedi were in hiding, being hunted on Darth Vader’s orders. McGregor returns to the role, finding Obi-Wan living on Tatooine, in a very different place psychologically.
“We just started with this idea that he was broken,” the actor says.
“He was a man broken by the experience of Order 66 [a Dark Side plot to kill all Jedi] and the fact that he’d lost his faith. I thought it was interesting to take him into a darker place and then over the course of the series, see how he finds his faith again and gets back to being the Obi-Wan that we knew and loved.”