Star Wars: Ewan McGregor Confirms When Obi-Wan Kenobi Series Begins Filming

Lucasfilm’s Obi-Wan could be an earlier release than initially thought. Series lead Ewan McGregor has confirmed that, as of now, the production is fully expected to start principal photography next March. In a virtual chat during a recent episode of Graham Norton, the Star Wars superstar confirmed the series is very much about his character hiding out from the Empire in the years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. That’s when McGregor confirmed when he’s going to start filming his part on the series.

“We start shooting it in March next year,” the actor confirmed.

The chat then dove into the content of the series as a guest asked McGregor how much closer he’ll be to Alec Guinness’s portrayal in A New Hope now that both the actor and character are significantly older than their previous appearances.

“The fun thing about doing them in the first place, when I was much younger, was trying to imagine Alec Guinness and how he would play these streams as a younger guy,” McGregor said. “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. This time, I will be much closer in age to him and it will be my challenge to sort of meet him somewhere. It’s a great honor to try and pretend to be him.”

Earlier this year, McGregor said he was more excited to work on this solo series than he was during the prequel trilogy years.

“I’m more excited about doing this one than I was doing the second and third one that we did before,” the actor shared with Empire. “I’m just excited about working with Deborah Chow, and the storylines are going to be really good I think. I’m just excited to play him again. It’s been long enough since I played him before.”

He added, “The first three [Star Wars films] I did were really at the very beginning of digital photography. We had a camera with an umbilical cord to a tent, it was like back to the beginning of movies where the camera didn’t move very much because there was so much hardware attached to it. Now we’re going to be able to really create stuff without swathes of green-screen and blue-screen, which becomes very tedious for the actor.”

Obi-Wan has yet to set a release date.

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