This week, McGregor sat down at the Variety Lounge at Edinburgh International Film Festival to discuss the 30th anniversary of Trainspotting, where the topic of discussion veered inexorably toward the current status of the actor’s most popular role, which he’s played off and on since 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.
Indeed, McGregor has been busy working his Jedi mojo on Lucasfilm to get a new Kenobi yarn going. “The next time we find Obi-Wan Kenobi, he’s Alec Guinness up in the mountains,” McGregor told E! News earlier this week during promotion for his new film The End Of Oak Street. “What happens between those two moments is what I want to do and spend the rest of my career doing these stories. Stories, you know, series or movies. We’ve got plenty of time; I’ve got 10 years before I am Alec Guinness’ age. So come on, Disney!”
In the Variety interview (around the 11:00 mark), the actor revealed that he’s been proactive about securing fresh Jedi work, going so far as pitching ideas to Lucasfilm president and CCO Dave Filoni during shooting for Ahsoka season two, which co-stars his wife, Mary Elizabeth Winstead. “It was very casual, but I said there’s got to be something,” McGregor said, before casually name-dropping another wildly consequential name from that galaxy far, far away. “Because Yoda’s somewhere else. After the end of Episode III, when we all go to the four or five corners of the galaxy—or however many corners it’s got!—I won’t have been in touch with him. But he’s out there. So I think there could be a story there where I’m trying to reach out to him.”
The idea of continuing Obi-Wan’s story seems to have McGregor dreaming so big that he’s bending space-time to accommodate his Jedi flights of fancy, even suggesting a potential love story between Obi-Wan and Winstead’s Hera Syndulla—whose story, as most Star Wars historians will tell you, is separated from the Kenobi series by roughly 18 years. “I got very excited when Mary started working on Ahsoka. I thought, maybe this is the big love story: Obi-Wan and Hera,” he said, noting that “time doesn’t really mean anything” in Star Wars, which is either an oblique, incredibly nerdy reference to the time-warping dimension called World Between Worlds introduced in Star Wars Rebels (where Hera also debuted) or a frank acknowledgment that, in the grand scheme of onscreen/offscreen ardor and gainful employment, the fast-and-loose laws of physics, such as they are in Star Wars, need not apply.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.