Ewan McGregor wants to be Obi-Wan Kenobi again and is waiting on a call from Disney
Ewan McGregor is 'pretty sure' he will get to play Obi-Wan Kenobi again but hasn't yet had the call.
In just a matter of days you'll be able to get a big dollop of Ewan McGregor on your TV screens as new Paramount+ series A Gentleman in Moscow releases.
With the series based on the novel of the same name by Amor Towles, McGregor plays the lead role of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a Russian aristocrat who returns to Moscow after the revolution.
Advert
While he would normally be shot, the Count is instead granted a reprieve in the form of a lifelong house arrest in a Moscow hotel, and A Gentleman in Moscow follows him through several decades of his life in the hotel.
Sitting down with UNILAD to discuss the series, we couldn't resist asking him about the possibility of a return to the Star Wars universe in the future.
The good news is he's 'pretty sure' he'll get the chance to play Obi-Wan Kenobi again, the slightly less good news is that he hasn't had the call from Lucasfilm or Disney to say another one is in the works.
He said: "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.
“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."
It sounds like fans of Obi-Wan Kenobi will have to adopt the Jedi virtue of patience to get their final answer.
As for what he's up to now, McGregor has said that he thinks people will really enjoy A Gentleman in Moscow and reckons the series is 'like watching an old movie'.
He told UNILAD that reading the novel by Towles he hadn't 'felt that way about a book for a long time' as it 'absolutely sucked me into the story', which only spurred his excitement to be working on the series.
“I'm happy to say I think that we've managed to achieve the same effect with the show," he said of the upcoming Paramount+ series.
"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."
Something McGregor particularly enjoyed was getting to have a magnificent moustache, as being on A Gentleman in Moscow has given him 'a phantom one'.
He also worked with a movement coach to better portray a character we see over the course of decades, with several of the actors having to change their performance over time to reflect this.
"My character the Count sort of almost went the opposite way.
"I found during this movement exercise that as he gets older he sort of drops all the physicality of having to be a Count and carrying his aristocratic ideals.
"They sort of crumble over time of his house arrest in the hotel he becomes a real man and he realises that the important things in his life are love and friendship and family.
"Those become more important to him, he becomes more loose and lighter."
McGregor was also able to draw on some of his real-life experiences of being a waiter for the role, telling us 'I know about that, the stress of that going in and out of the kitchen'.
Another aspect which amazed the A Gentleman in Moscow star was the opulent sets for the hotel, and described being able to walk around the entire place and 'forget it wasn't real'.
He said: "You come in the door of the studio and you'd turn left, then you'd be looking at the front of the revolving door of the hotel from the outside and you'd walk through the revolving door," he said of the maze of sets all put together.
“You walk up the stairs there'd be the reception desk, the Soviet literature store, the barber shop, the bar, you'd walk through there’d be a staircase up to the balcony all the way around the elevator stairs and then you could go down either side down a corridor into the piazza restaurant, it was all one huge set.
"You go in there in the morning and you start to forget it wasn't a real place, it was beautifully done."
A Gentleman in Moscow releases on Paramount Plus with Showtime on 29 March.
Topics: Ewan McGregor, Star Wars, Film and TV
Joe Harker