"Obi-Wan Kenobi" stars Ewan McGregor, Moses Ingram and director Deborah Chow discuss their Star Wars series in this interview.
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00:00I think that's one of the satisfying things for the fans is that we we do have strands between
00:06three and episode three and episode four that I think will be very satisfying for the fans and
00:11the audience. Hello there. It was interesting and it was sort of representative of where he's at,
00:25in terms of his existence now, out with the Jedi Order, which has been, as we know,
00:33destroyed at the end of the Revenge of the Sith. So he's living in a very different sort of time.
00:39I think it is a darker time. And personally speaking, he's living without the Force and
00:47he's in hiding. He can't use the Force for fear of being found out. We can see from the trailer
00:52that there are Inquisitors, the Grand Inquisitor and the Inquisitors, whose job it is to hunt down
00:59the last Jedi and to destroy them. So he's living with this hanging over him. And I think the fear
01:09of it is driven mainly because he has this responsibility to Luke Skywalker and the promise
01:14that he made to Padme to look after him. And so that's his only real link to the past, is that.
01:21Obviously, at this point in the timeline, all the Jedis are in hiding. So it's like he can't go out
01:27and be using the Force all the time or be using his saber. So it's an interesting thing to take
01:32a character that is so quintessentially a Jedi and then you're kind of stripping them down and
01:37taking away a lot of the tools that they're known for, they usually use. So it was kind of a very
01:44cool starting point, honestly, to take this character and then have the opportunity to try
01:48to build him back up over the course of the series. I myself actually got in trouble because
01:54I was informed that my character is indeed not of the Sith, but of the Inquisitorious, which is a
02:03big, big difference. Can I tell you the difference? I would not dare try, not on camera. Sith, there's
02:11the rule of two. So, you know, it's not an it's not an open membership on that one. But, you know,
02:16I think they're all what's interesting about the Inquisitors is that they're all individuals,
02:22you know, they're not a monolithic team or an entity. So they all have a really interesting
02:26backstory. And some of those backstories, you know, they've already delved into. And there's
02:30so much more, I think, there to explore. But to me, they all had different reasons why they turned
02:36and they're all very powerful. So it's a collective of individuals, which I think makes the Inquisitor
02:42so interesting. Everyone knows Obi-Wan and Darth Vader. They're like the quintessential
02:49archetypal hero and villain. And so just being around them, seeing them in costume on set,
02:56there'd be many times where I'd have to double take and check myself like, oh, my God, I can't
03:02believe that this is happening. I can't believe that this is happening. And the closer we get
03:06to people seeing it, I think the more surreal that it gets that I had anything to do with what
03:11we're about to see. Yeah, that was the trickiest thing. You know, we're trying to tell a story
03:16that's in between two trilogies where everybody knows what happened before and after to these
03:21characters. So in large part, we're trying to tell the second act for these characters. So,
03:26you know, I think we tried to approach it with just as much respect as we could to the canon.
03:31And, you know, we definitely felt the responsibility of that. But at the same time,
03:34we really did need to tell an original story and tell a new story. But I think one of the most
03:39exciting things was within that framework, you know, coming from a character perspective,
03:44this is a different point. They're not the exact character that they were at the end of Revenge of
03:48the Sith or in A New Hope. So it was really interesting to explore that at this point.
03:52I mean, we definitely wanted this show to be character driven. And, you know, first and
03:56foremost, the show is called Obi-Wan Kenobi. It is about him. And I think, you know, one of the most
04:02important things to us was that we really wanted to have a little bit more depth and spend more
04:06time and get to really know him, not only the Jedi, but also the man and get more into the
04:10character. So for me, I think I would probably describe it as it is a very personal story. It
04:16is a very emotional story, but it's definitely set in a fairly epic sort of mythic environment.
04:23I felt like sometimes Obi-Wan had accepted that the Jedi was finished,
04:28like it was over. And other times I felt, well, he is looking over Luke Skywalker and he might be
04:33doing that because he feels like Luke Skywalker might become a Jedi. So he should be there to
04:37help him. And we know, you know, in A New Hope, at the beginning of A New Hope, as soon as Alec
04:43Guinness meets Mark Hamill, he immediately starts talking about the Jedi and gets the lightsabers
04:48out. And he's so clearly he has hope in him. But at the beginning of our series, I think I'm not
04:55sure that that hope is very, it's probably pretty much buried down. I think that definitely
05:00that will be one of the satisfying things about watching it, I think.