“Well, of course I know him — he’s me!” The words of Obi-Wan in the original Star Wars take on new meaning in a deepfake superimposing Alec Guinness’ face over Ewan McGregor’s in Obi-Wan Kenobi. Set a decade after Revenge of the Sith and another nine years before A New Hope, the Disney+ series sees McGregor reprise his role from the Star Wars prequels as the younger version of Guinness’ sage Jedi Master. YouTuber stryder HD, known for viral videos inserting Keanu Reeves and Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown into Star Wars, has edited episodes of Obi-Wan deepfaking the late Guinness over McGregor’s performance.
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Watch stryder HD’s video below, titled “Ewan McGregor Replaced with Alec Guinness in the Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi Series.”
Another digital artist, the YouTuber Shamook, landed a job at Lucasfilm after their viral video deepfaked Mark Hamill’s digitally de-aged Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian. In a statement, Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic said ILM “has been investing in both machine learning and A.I. as a means to produce compelling visual effects work and it’s been terrific to see momentum building in this space as the technology advances.”
In an interview with Australia’s The Project, the 51-year-old McGregor revealed how he approached playing the character more like Guinness in Obi-Wan Kenobi. McGregor first played Obi-Wan as a young Jedi Knight in 1999’s The Phantom Menace before reprising the role in 2002’s Attack of the Clones and 2005’s Revenge of the Sith.
“[Obi-Wan] is always Alec Guinness to me. When I play him, I always have to have a sense of Alec Guinness,” he said. “And now I’m closer to him in age — I didn’t realize he was 63 when he made [Star Wars] … I’m getting closer to that age now (laughs). As I get closer to him, I have to be more like him, I suppose.”
McGregor continued, “It’s always been my mission to make my Obi-Wan Kenobi grow up into Alec Guinness, so I’ve always got Alec in my head.”
Starring Ewan McGregor, Moses Ingram, Rupert Friend, Joel Edgerton, Bonnie Piesse, Indira Varma, Sung Kang, Grant Feely as young Luke Skywalker, Vivien Lyra Blair as young Leia Organa, and Hayden Christensen as Darth Vader, new episodes of Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi are streaming Wednesdays on Disney+.
