Ewan McGregor sounds pretty hopeful about his chances of playing Obi-Wan Kenobi again, as he said he’s not had any call about going back but reckons there’ll be another chance in his future.
While you’ll know him from plenty of roles an actor sometimes just gets a part which they’re going to be asked about for the rest of their career, and for McGregor that’s likely to be Obi-Wan Kenobi.
So naturally when we sat down with him to talk about his new series A Gentleman in Moscow we couldn’t help but ask whether there’s more Star Wars in the offing.
You might remember that he had to spend years covering up his return to Star Wars in the Obi-Wan Kenobi limited series to avoid the secret getting out ahead of time.
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This time around he promises he’s telling the truth when he says he's not yet had the call but is 'pretty sure' he'll get another chance.
"The truth is I've talked about having to cover for doing the Obi-Wan season for years, I had to lie about that and I'm not lying about this now," he told LADbible.
“I don't know. There's been no phone call to me from Lucasfilm, or Disney saying, ‘Let's do another one’. Obi-Wan was made as a limited series and it's out and people like it, which I'm very, very pleased about.
“I love doing it. I hope we get a chance to do another one and I'm sure we will. I'm pretty sure, you know, I've got a few years yet before I'm the same age as Alec Guinness was in A New Hope. So there's time to tell more stories in there."
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There you have it folks, nothing is locked in right now but Mr Obi-Wan Kenobi himself is ‘pretty sure’ he’ll get the chance to do another series and is hoping for something along those lines.
If it turns out your humble writer was taken in by McGregor when he said he was ‘not lying about this now’ and another Star Wars project involving him is already in the works then rest assured I won’t too upset because it means we’ll be getting more of him as Obi-Wan Kenobi and that’s a win in my book.
Even if there’s not been a call to say there’s going to be another one McGregor is right that there’s plenty of time for something to happen.
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At the age of 52 he’s a good decade younger than Sir Alec Guinness was in the original Star Wars, so the window of opportunity for him to make a comeback is wide open and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.
The way Kenobi left off also gave us a good gap of a few years between it and Obi-Wan’s first chronological appearance on the big screen, so there’s no rush and the Jedi virtue of patience might need to be exercised.
While he hopes to have a chance to return to Star Wars at some point, McGregor’s not exactly been waiting by the phone as he’s been keeping himself busy with a plethora of other projects including his recent TV series A Gentleman in Moscow.
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Adapted from the novel by Amor Towles, McGregor plays Russian aristocrat Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who returns to Russia after the revolution and is arrested.
While he would normally be shot, his name is attached to a revolutionary poem and as such some see him as a hero, so instead he is sentenced to live the rest of his life under house arrest in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol.
As you can see in the above image McGregor sported a truly magnificent moustache for the role, and he admitted that he does miss having his upper lip so richly adorned.
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He said he feels as though he has a 'phantom' moustache from playing the Count, and realised one recent day as he was driving his kid to school that his hands were searching for it, only to discover it wasn't there.
McGregor worked with a movement coach for his part in A Gentleman in Moscow where he plays the Count over several decades of his life to portray the character growing older, but found the more the character aged the more he moved.
He put it down to his character becoming 'a real man' during his time in house arrest as he sheds his aristocratic trappings.
Joining McGregor on screen for A Gentleman in Moscow is his wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays glamourous actress Anna Urbanova.
The two of them share a romance on the screen as well as off it, and in a recent interview McGregor said the couple had an intimacy co-ordinator for their scenes, describing the role as 'still necessary' even when the on-screen couple were together even away from the cameras.
As for what made the series appeal to McGregor, the book was what first drew him in as he told us: "There's something about Amor's novel that I haven't felt that way about a book a long time, it absolutely sucked me into the story and I was living in it.
“I'm happy to say I think that we've managed to achieve the same effect with the show, I think it really will draw you in and it'll be a beautiful sort of escapism, and at the same time there's something about the drama of the piece which is very old fashioned.
“I love that, I like that it harks back to stories of great heart and love and heartbreak and joy and sorrow. It's like watching an old movie. I think people will really like it.”
A Gentleman in Moscow releases on Paramount Plus with SHOWTIME on 29 March.
Topics: Ewan McGregor, TV and Film, Celebrity, Star Wars
Joe Harker