The first episode of The Mandalorian debuted today, giving us our first look at Lucasfilm's ever-growing slate of Star Wars TV shows. One of several in development is the long-awaited Obi-Wan Kenobi series, which will find Ewan McGregor returning to the role he played throughout the Prequel Trilogy. Production on the six-episode series is expected to start shooting next July, with Deborah Chow (The Mandalorian) directing and Hossein Amini (The Alienist) scripting, and Amini recently spoke with Discussing Film where he dropped a few tidbits about the upcoming series.
I can’t say very much. The plan is to start shooting in July, Ewan McGregor is signed on. I think he’s already said that it spans the period between episodes 3 and 4, so sort of after the fall of the republic and the massacre of the Jedi before the events of ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’. It’s fascinating in the sense that it’s a period where there is a lot of change in the galaxy and a lot of hardship. So, for Obi Wan’s character, he has a lot to adjust to given the loss of his close friends and the order that he believed in. It felt like a really exciting opportunity to explore a different side of a franchise that I always loved and I’ve always loved it because of its spiritual aspects as well as its fun and action elements, it seems to work on way more than one level which isn’t always true for those big franchises.
The Obi-Wan Kenobi series first began life as a feature-film from Stephen Daldry (The Crown), which is when Hossein Amini became involved, but the screenwriter believes that the story will work best as a six-episode series. "The situation is so complex both for him personally and in a way, the state of the galaxy, you sort of need time to explore it and to be honest there are loads of other stories within that period as well, it’s quite a few years," Amini said. "There is so much going on between episode 3 and 4 that hasn’t been explored. The idea of being able to go into a character journey plus the politics and plus all the vastness of the empire and what’s going on is exciting just because it feels like a proper period of history and sometimes that is hard to do in two hours. Sometimes with two-hour movies there is always an imperative for the action and the plot to move particularly fast and quickly and to go from action sequence to action sequence and there are many more aspects to storytelling that I find interesting." Amini added that he's spent the past few years researching all he can on as many subjects as possible.
I try to keep the research as varied as possible, going into all sorts of books about crisis and extraordinary bits of anthropological stuff and you get inspired by everything and that’s amazing about what George Lucas has done with Star Wars is that it’s just so full of- whether it’s Buddhism or theology or anthropology, it’s got so much it’s just so rich and I sort of feel again that with the research reading all the Star Wars stuff but also all the stuff that George Lucas himself read from ‘A hero with a thousand faces’ to all the studies he did from Samurai costumes to weapons, there are masses to research.
The first episode of The Mandalorian is now streaming on Disney+ (check out a review from our own Alex Maidy), but there are several more Star Wars TV shows in development, including the Obi-Wan series as well as a Cassian Andor series set to star ROGUE ONE's Diego Luna and Alan Tudyk.