Ewan McGregor on Obi-Wan, his feud with Danny Boyle and why autograph hunters are ‘animals’

After too much green screen and online vitriol Ewan McGregor was pretty over Star Wars – here’s what convinced him to return.

When Ewan McGregor shot his final scenes for Revenge of the Sith at Sydney’s Fox Studios in 2003, he was pretty sure he’d worn the robes of the Obi-Wan Kenobi for the very last time.

“It felt pretty final,” he says over Zoom call from his Los Angeles home, leaning heavily into the last word.

“I was like, get me off this f---ing green screen.”

As much as the Scottish actor had loved playing the younger version of the beloved Jedi Master originated by Sir Alec Guinness in the George Lucas’ original 1977 Star Wars – and treasured his time in the New South Wales capital – he’d become tired of the effects-heavy shoots.

The first movie of Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy, The Phantom Menace, had been filmed in London using many more physical sets but by the time McGregor got to the sequel, Attack Of the Clones, he found himself spending a lot of time alone, acting opposite tennis balls that would later become computer generated aliens.

“It was just a lot of hard work and it wasn’t food for the soul necessarily,” he recalls.

“I certainly didn’t anticipate doing it again. I signed up for three – here’s three and I was off to do other things. I was always a bit scared that you might get defined by a kind of movie and if you’re defined by a franchise, that’s not what I really wanted for my career.”

Ewan McGregor returns as Obi-Wan Kenobi in a new series on Disney+.

Post Star Wars, McGregor mixed up big-screen blockbusters such as Angels and Demons and Birds of Prey with acclaimed dramas including August: Osage County and Our Kind Of Traitor.

He also found success on the small screen with Fargo and last year’s Halton, winning a Golden Globe for the former and an Emmy for the latter.

He even managed to squeeze in three marathon motorbike trips with his best mate Charley Boorman, which were filmed for the documentaries Long Way Round, Long Way Down and Long Way Up.

But all the time, for better and worse, Star Wars was never far away.

Even in the most remote regions of his two-wheeled trips around Europe, Africa and America, he’d be recognised for his life-changing role in the cult space western.

When he was baled up in the street or at a premiere, it was often a professional autograph hunter who wanted some Star Wars merchandise signed, so they could then sell it – something that left McGregor with a bitter taste in his mouth.

“The guys at the premieres are always crushing children against the barriers and they’re f---ing animals you know, they’re horrible people,” McGregor says distastefully.

“But the actual Star Wars fans tend not to be, they seem to be quite nice people.”

Then, when it came to doing press for any of his many projects, his interviews always ended the same way.

Ewan McGregor, Deborah Chow and Joel Edgerton on the set of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“The last two questions were always ‘would you do a sequel to Trainspotting?’ And then, ‘would you come back as Obi-Wan Kenobi?’,” McGregor says with a laugh.

But slowly, his attitude towards all things Star Wars began to change.

While the prequel trilogy had done huge business at the box office, the critics and many fans of the original films hadn’t been so kind.

McGregor admits now that the vitriol stung at the time but as the years passed, he realised that there was an audience that embraced his films in the same way that he had loved the Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford films when he was younger.

“The fact that there was a lot of criticism about them and people didn’t appear to like them was one thing,” he says.

“But 15 years later, I’ve met many, many people who were kids when they came out and for them our (films) are their Star Wars. And I like that. In a way that’s made it more satisfying that I did them in the first place.”

So after years of people asking him whether he’d be up for reprising his two most famous roles, he started to ask himself the same question.

“When I was asked in interviews, I would say ‘yeah, I’d be up for it – I’d like to do it’. And then Disney contacted me after some years of that going ‘can you come and speak to us?’ I went in and they went ‘look we just want to know – do you mean it? Would you want to do it?’. And I said ‘yeah, I would be up for it – I think there’s got to be a good story between Episode Three and Episode Four’ and I started getting excited about the idea of it.”

After several false starts – at one point it was going to be film directed by Stephen Daldry of Billy Elliot and The Crown fame – Obi-Wan Kenobi will finally arrive on Disney+ later this month.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) in a scene from Obi-Wan.

The six-part series will be set 10 years after the events of Revenge of the Sith with the “broken, faithless” title character drawn away from his hermit’s life watching over the young Luke Skywalker and thrust into a planet-hopping new adventure.

Directed by The Mandalorian’s Deborah Chow, it will bring back characters from the prequel trilogy including Joel Edgerton’s Owen Lars, Bonnie Piesse’s Beru Whitesun Lars and – in a development that had diehard fans losing their collective minds – Hayden Christensen’s Dark Lord of the Sith himself, Darth Vader.

McGregor’s first real test came when he had to do readings as Obi-Wan opposite other prospective cast members. On a borrowed Mandalorian set and with some “Obi Wan-esque things” plundered from the costume department, McGregor certainly looked the part, but despite the excited gasps of the nerd-stacked American crew, something was missing.

“I couldn’t quite find his voice,” he says.

“It just sounded English and it took me a wee minute to get back into feeling like Alec Guinness. That’s all I have to do – if I am saying the lines, I think I have an Alec Guinness gauge in my head now. If it feels like him, I’m happy, and if it doesn’t, I’ve got to try to do another take or something.”

Ewan McGregor as Renton and Robert Carlyle as Begbie in T2 Trainspotting.

Thankfully, he’d already had a trial run having brought back Renton in T2 Trainspotting five years earlier. McGregor had famously fallen out with Danny Boyle when the Oscar-winning director cast Leonardo DiCaprio over him in the 2000 thriller The Beach and the pair didn’t speak for years.

“It was such a shame because I just loved being his actor, I loved being his guy. I wanted to be in everything he ever did and I would have at the expense of anything else I’ve done,” he says.

“I just got older and I wanted to be on his set again. He was my first director and I missed being on his set. I missed the way he directed and he got my best work out of me, I think.”

But when McGregor fronted the Edinburgh set and made contact with Ewan Bremner (Spud), Jonny Lee Miller (Sick Boy) and Robert Carlyle (Begbie), the decades just fell away.

“We hadn’t seen each other for 20 years and I was immediately back into it,” he says.

“It was just still there, like 20 years hadn’t taken place. And it was much the same with Obi Wan, I guess.”

Obi-Wan Kenobi streams on Disney+ on May 27

Originally published as Ewan McGregor on Obi-Wan, his feud with Danny Boyle and why autograph hunters are ‘animals’