Ewan McGregor describes reuniting with Hayden Christensen on Obi-Wan Kenobi as “spine-tingling”
The two actors are set to reprise their roles as the "friends turned enemies" Force users in the upcoming Disney Plus series
Aux News Hayden Christensen
Did you sense that massive disturbance in the Force? No, it wasn’t the release of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s first trailer (although that did cause some seismic uproars across the internet). That sense of upheaval and flourishing Force signatures comes from news of once closely allied Jedi friends—now great enemies— reuniting once more.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Ewan McGregor discussed how intense it was to see Hayden Christensen back in the role of Darth Vader on Obi-Wan Kenobi.
“To see Hayden back in the role of Anakin, well… it was sort of spine-tingling,” he said. “It was amazing. It was just amazing to see Hayden full-stop. I’m so close to him—we’ve stayed in touch over the years, but we haven’t seen each other for a long time.”
That excitement to see Christensen as Vader is buzzing to a 10 on the heavy breathing scale, but little is still known about his role in the Disney+ series. With no appearance in the recently dropped trailer, Disney has only given us a single image of the Sith villain leaving his meditation chamber.
“His shadow is cast across so much of what we do,” hinted series writer Joby Harold to Entertainment Weekly. “And the degree of his proximity to that shadow is something that we’ll discover. But he is very much a part of the show emotionally for Obi-Wan, and possibly beyond that as well.”
One of those characters likely influenced by Darth Vader will be a new villain created for the series—the Inquisitor Reva. Played by Moses Ingram (The Queen’s Gambit), she and other Inquisitors are led by The Grand Inquisitor on their mission to find and kill all remaining Jedi post-Order 66.
Even with Christensen’s Vader making it difficult for McGregor’s in-hiding Jedi, he expressed lots of love and excitement in getting to work with his former Padawan.
“I love him so much,” McGregor said. “We have this very special bond of making two of those first three films together. It was so important for both of us—for our careers and who we are.”
Although it was “odd” to be on set with him once again, McGregor similarly didn’t feel like time had passed at all.
“I looked across at him and we’re on a set and… I look over at him and he’s Anakin now, and I’m Obi-Wan now, and it’s like nothing had happened,” he recounted. “I didn’t see any age on his face. I just felt like the period of time between Episode III and now didn’t exist. It was so peculiar.”
Watch Hayden Christensen and Ewan McGregor reunite on Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi on May 25.
96 Comments
“for our careers and who we are”Oof, dude.
Stop hating. They were friends. Get some so you can know how it feels
I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way, but damn…
“I didn’t see any age on his face. I just felt like the period of time between Episode III and now didn’t exist. It was so peculiar.”
Hahahah. Meanwhile I bet poor Hayden felt every goddamn one of those years in between.
I don’t know that I’ve seen him in anything else. Can the guy act?
Fans used to say he could based on one or two other appearances, but good luck pretending his turn as Bob Dylan in Factory Girl was anything special.
I can’t believe we’ve come all the way around from “Hayden Christensen ruined Star Wars” to “Star Wars ruined Hayden Christensen.”
I mean, he has spent 2 decades now with people saying how bad he was in what should have been (and I guess technically was, for the worse) a career-defining role. And unless he’s spent the past 17 years living with the Amish where he can’t get any internet, he knows damn well how much people have shit talked him. That’s gotta ruin a guy, mentally at least.
there’s gonna be a quote like this every 2 weeks for the next 2 months.
I really don’t know about this. He looked so goofy in the suit at the end of Episode III, clearly not as tall as David Prowse. Hell, Christensen is only a couple inches taller than McGregor himself.Hope they have a good supply of Tom Cruise-style apple boxes handy.
“Arise, Lord Vader, and eat thy Wheaties.”
If they can use CGI to make Luke look young, they can make Hayden look taller.
I hope it’s more effective than Jedi Magic Ken….
I mean, he’s a cyborg, he can be as tall as he wants. They could wire his ass up to an AT-AT and it doesn’t break the lore or anything.
Does he have the strength of five gorillas?
he can get D-cups… full of justice
Hope they have a good supply of Tom Cruise-style apple boxes handy. Or ramps. Or a trench for Ewan 🤣
So they were on set together, which means either they share a scene (which, please, no) or one of them was just hanging out on set while the other was shooting.
they’ve confirmed they’re going to be in scenes together.
Then let’s hope by the Force they’re flashbacks.
Why? Was there any canon reason to suspect that Mustafaar was the last time OB1 saw Anakin all the way until he’s an old man in New Hope?
My hope as well.
At first I thought that would render the “I sense a presence…” line obsolete, but it looks like Luke is about 5 in this, so if they haven’t seen each other in 10 or 15 years (AND NOT ON TATOOINE!), I think it works OK without some twisted, contrived, ret-con.
It’s not because it violates canon; it’s because it’s totally unnecessary. Obi-wan can have adventures that don’t involve Darth Vader!
No, the implication (and I know it’s merely an implication and not stated) is that they haven’t seen each other since Vader’s turn. (“I was but the learner” and all…) So, any Vader/Obi Wan interim meet-up definitely derails the intention.
Unless OWK leaves Tatooine for some reason and comes across Vader, it’s going to be more illogical bullshit that collapses the entire universe into a handful of locations and characters. Vader sure as hell shouldn’t have any reason to be anywhere near that useless, dustbowl planet.
Yeah, as long as it’s been a while the line still works. Especially if the series ends with (my personal theory) Anakin thinking Obi-Wan’s dead.
“Uh, I’m not the Obi-Wan you are looking for.”“Oh, cool, nvm.”
It’s been basically confirmed there will be an Obi-Wan/Vader rematch. While I initially resisted the notion I’ve come around to it, if only because Obi-Wan ends episode 3 at “You were my brother, Anakin, I loved you.” and episode 4-6 , calls him by his Sith title Darth, separates him from Ankain “from a certain point of view”, “He’s more machine now than man, twisted and evil”.Still a bit of a hitch with “When we last met I was but the learner now I am the Master” but one thing Star Wars is great at is retcons retcons retcons!
If the show is good enough, they can probably pull off whatever it is. If it’s as blunderful was TBOBF, it’ll just be more nostalgia wankery. We’ll see.
I’ve been hoping they would be “Forcetiming,” as introduced in TLJ, which would allow the actors to share scenes without Obi-Wan giving away his location, or having a lightsaber battle, or otherwise messing with the established continuity in ANH.I don’t care how many rabbits they’re planning on pulling out of a hat, I just can’t accept that the two of them ran into each other between Episode 3 & 4. There are too many indications in the dialogue of ANH that they haven’t seen each other at all since the Jedi Purge.I certainly can’t accept that there was a lightsaber duel rematch in between the lava-Frogger sequence and the Death Star.
whatever it is, the Internet is going to lose it’s goddamn mind every single episode because it’s dealing with unknown events of Holy Canon Characters like Obi-Wan and Darth Vader. Last Jedi level freakouts except for 6 weeks straights. To quote a certain Jedi Master, “Hold on to your butts!”
“Forcetiming”! Hah! I’d been calling it Force Skype, but that’s much better.As far as them meeting in person, eh… we’ve all long since taken “When I left you, I was but the learner. Now, I am the master” to mean their duel on Mustafar; but I think it could easily be construed to mean another meeting a few years later. (If you really want to nitpick the language, Vader says “when I left you,” which is not what happened on Mustafar; Obi-wan left Anakin behind. So it would fit the wording if they had another meeting (e.g. one depicted in this series) where Vader was the one who departed first. On the other hand, it could just be rhetorical, meaning “when I last saw you” rather than literally “the last time we met, I was the one who departed first.”)
E.g. if this is when Luke is 5, then there’s still 15 years until ANH. Let’s say he and Ben meet up and have another duel during this series (which, for the record, I think is too fraught with fanservice to be a good idea narratively, but I’d be happy to be proved wrong). Ben wins again, although this time he doesn’t injure Vader; maybe the duel isn’t just about them trying to kill each other, but about Ben protecting or keeping something from Vader, and he manages to do this and escape without injury. Thus, Vader (probably infuriated by the event) still feels like Obi-wan is more powerful than him, and still thinks of himself as the “learner” and Obi-wan as the “master.” (On the other hand, if we take “when I left you” as probative (which we don’t have to), then it could be an encounter where Vader’s primary goal is to acquire something/someone that Obi-wan has; Vader either succeeds or fails but in either case departs the encounter first.)
15 years later (ANH), Vader’s grown much more powerful, and Obi-wan has grown old, and Vader now thinks of himself as the “master” (or maybe he’s just saying it for rhetorical effect and isn’t too hung up on whether he’s formally a “master” or not).That said, I reiterate that I think it’s a bad idea to fit in narratively with what we already know, and we can ignore the language: the impact of their rematch on the Death Star is blunted if the defeat on Mustafar wasn’t actually the last time they met. Nothing in ANH’s dialogue mandates that that be the case, but the story is much more powerful if their previous encounter was Mustafar.
Yeah, good points all around. I think what we’re really discussing is the role head canon has played in fans’ understanding of the story over time, which is separate from a legalistic interpretation of the dialog.There is nothing in ANH or the later films stating that Vader’s injuries were the result of losing a lightsaber duel to Obi-Wan, much less that the duel occurred over a lava pit. This just kind of came to be accepted as Vader’s origin story, thanks to blurbs on the back of action figures and stuff like that.When he made ROTS, George Lucas could easily have had a piano fall on Anakin’s head and explained *that* was the reason he was in the Vader suit! It wouldn’t have contradicted a single line of original trilogy dialog. Of course, he chose to just recreate the epic lava pit duel that had always existed in the public imagination.Because for all Lucas’ faults, he understood when he made the prequels that he couldn’t pull too many fast ones and deliberately violate everyone’s head canon.A between-films rematch between Obi-Wan and Vader, regardless of the explanation, will violate that head canon.
If the sequel trilogy has any value at all it is that they are so monumentally awful that it has forced a cultural re-examination of the prequel trilogy. The fact that we are LOOKING FORWARD to seeing Hayden Fucking Christensen as Darth Vader again is staggering to me. For years he was considered the worst part of those movies and I still remember the collective cultural screams when GL digitally inserted him as a ghost into the final shot of Return of the Jedi.
What a time to be alive.
Not really. The kids who grew up with them like them, the end. Nobody else is “re-examining” anything about the prequels. It’s like digging around a bucket of diarrhea for nuggets of corn.
I disagree with this – I think there has been a reappraisal and mostly by people who weren’t old enough to see the prequels in theaters. Most people I know who, like myself, came of age during the prequels enjoyed them well enough as kids and then realized they were bad around college.
Thank you for joining my Only Fans page, by the way. I didn’t think so many people would be that interested in what was in the bucket.
I’m someone who was old enough to have ANH be the first movie I remember watching, on cable. I then went on to watch the re-release of the OT in theaters and the prequels on their opening nights.
I totally re-examined the prequels in the light of the kids who love them. They’re not good, per se, but they are _better_. Vicarious joy is all right.
You haven’t spent time on the right parts of the internet then, because I can assure you that there are a lot, arguably too many, articles/videos out there of people saying “actually the prequels aren’t that bad”. Usually by milennials who grew up with them experiencing nostalgia, but occasionally by older Star Wars fans who hate the sequels so much that they would rather talk up the prequels.
The prequels were born a new life about a decade ago in Prequel Memes.
You must have not have seen many movies if the sequel trilogy was so monumentally awful for you. Or you just take Star Wars too seriously.
The prequels were disasters, but at least they were original disasters. The sequels were pointless rehashes, particularly TFA.
Yeah, as terrible as the prequels might have been, they were still personal, idiosyncratic works of art, while even at their best, the sequels were corporate product.
I used to make fun of the prequels for showing us that all of Star Wars was based on the manipulation of trade agreements. After a few years, that became kind of a brilliant and prescient idea of Lucas’s. Basic illuminati moving around of chess pieces as most of the pieces themselves could barely play checkers.
The sequels are better produced films with worse stories. They look great, the cast plays off each other well, but they add nothing to the story in the end and don’t even fit together well as a trilogy. They play it extremely safe in the production design, things look good but they don’t push anything beyond what the originals did visually. The prequels are directed by a guy who was rightly removed from writing and directing most of the original trilogy, and doesn’t seem to understand human emotion or where to focus a story beyond what he’s personally into, they look like shit cause of overextending the technology of the time, the actors are either bad or badly directed. Aside from that the art is mostly incredible, the narrative actually has a real throughline that makes sense and builds to a conclusion that informs the other movies, for better or worse ( cause they do really ruin a lot of what was either speculated to be cool, or otherwise brought up in EU novels)They’re both good and bad for completely different reasons, it really is fucking wild.
The writing for Anakin in AotC in particular was SOOO bad that it didn’t do him any favors. Some actors can rise above terrible dialogue, some can’t.
I think the objections to putting Christensen in Return of the Jedi had more to do with messing with a beloved movie in order to shoehorn in the prequels than it did with Christensen himself. To be clear, I’m not saying he’s good in the prequels — he’s not. But no actor managed to escape the prequels unscathed, including McGregor. It’s hard to imagine how they managed to throw together McGregor, Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Christopher Lee and get such universally listless acting, but they pulled it off.
The only answer for Portman has to be that she was told to be stoic and monotone because she was a queen or something. She’s never been that flat in anything else of hers I’ve seen, including her younger roles.
The Thor movies?
That’s definitely part of it. The characters in the prequels also don’t have well defined personalities, and a ton of every character’s lines are either exposition or them just announcing how they feel about something. That makes a nuanced performance challenging, and that challenge is only enhanced in a science fiction movie, where a lot of the script has characters talking about gibberish.To the extent actors settled on personalities for their characters, they tend to be irritating. McGregor’s Obi-Wan is peevish, Christiansen is whiny, etc.
Buried somewhere in the documentary add-ons to the DVD release of Episode II, they show a little bit of a screen test with Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman. It’s an early, rough version of one of their Naboo scenes. I wish the final film had contained the same chemistry and a similar level of acting as that screen test. When I first saw Episode II, I remember wondering why Hayden was cast. After seeing that screen test, I totally get it.
But, that mullet….
Just about everyone who has seen Christensen in anything else who has also seen the prequel trilogy says something to the effect of “you wouldn’t know it from the prequel trilogy, but he’s actually good.”
This guy said it. 1000%
The prequels had some terrific ideas and bad execution. The Force Awakens has horrible ideas, but solid execution. So, it’s a toss-up.
TFA basically had no ideas other than a storm trooper deserter. I couldn’t believe how much of an almost beat for beat remake of SW it was.
Nah, the sequel trilogy just reinforced that you really only need the OT, plus Rogue One. The prequels are still a massive disappointment. I loved The Last Jedi and thought it could wrap up the full series by taking the story in a new direction, but then they chickened out and so it sort of stands alone. That trilogy isn’t really a trilogy in any thematic sense.
Same with me. I thought TLJ was going to take the movies in a new direction. However, the backlash was so great against it, Disney panicked and we got Return Of The Jedi 2 instead.
it has forced a cultural re-examination of the prequel trilogy.The results of that re-examination? They’re still terrible.
Meesa think so tooooo! But there are a lot of Star Wars fans that will watch anything.
The sequel trilogy isn’t great, but it’s much more competent than the prequel trilogy. Anybody who wasn’t a small child when the prequels came out and thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.
The prequels suck because George Lucas was allowed free reign to go forward with a really terrible story without anyone (read: his wife and collaborators) checking him, editing him, and curtailing his worst instincts. And one of those bad instincts was to try and explain elements of his original Star Wars story that were so much better left unstated and imagined.The sequel trilogy sucks because of J.J. Abrams, full stop. Fan fiction and fan service, dressed up in Abrams’ pretentious puzzle box fetish and garnished with a visual style that he’s way more in love with than anyone else. The Last Jedi, for all its faults, was an attempt to course-correct and reach for some new ground, but Abrams and Disney wouldn’t let that happen.The whole Star Wars experience, for me as a guy who saw the original in the theater as a kid, has just gotten worse and worse over time because of how exploited it is and how heavily the fan gatekeeping has weighed on it recently. I think Dave Filoni’s efforts are the only ones that have brought back some of that wonder and appeal that made Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back such important parts of my early life.But if I’m being honest, my disillusionment with Star Wars started with Return of the Jedi, not the prequels, so I guess if I’m being self-reflective I was going into the prequels already prejudiced against them.
I think it’s less the issues with the sequels, and more the benefit of distance. With the prequels less immediate, it’s easier to look at what they were trying to do, what was good about them and where there was unrealised potential.People aren’t just excited for Hayden Christenson’s Vader, they’re interested to see what he can do with the character when he’s not being directed by George Lucas.
This feels like a time of redemption, which is my theory on why people are excited. Book of Boba Fett aside, what we got in The Mandalorian as well as Rogue One was such a badass return to form as well as advancement of Star Wars mythos & style, we would love to see what can be done to redeem what we WANTED in prequels.
McGregor is such a fine actor, and Christensen has proven himself to have talent beyond the limitations of the cringe-worthy prequel material he was given to work with.
So pairing the REAL 70s star wars spirit with prequel related content? It’s like a redemption for our fantasy fulfillment.
In all fairness, at least Hayden never had to say “yipee!” or “now this is pod racing.”
Christensen wasn’t the problem. That god-awful dialogue was. It was so bad it made even a good actress like Natalie Portman look like a film school wannabe.
By “staying in touch” does Ewan mean “I just constantly text ‘I have the high ground’ memes to Hayden?”That’s what I would do.
and “Hello There”, every day.
God I want this to be true.
As someone who was the right age to enjoy the prequels when they came out, it’s nuts people are actually looking forward to Hayden or really any prequel continuation. I guess the sequels were so perfunctory that it makes some of the prequels’ audacious badness look interesting in comparison, but those were objectively awful movies with awful performances. Revenge of the Sith specifically is absolutely embarrassing as a movie until the purge of the Jedi, which is at least competent.People seem to enjoy the idea of the prequels (which is understandable, as an outline they tell an ok story) without remember just how absolutely awful the execution was.
George couldn’t write to save his life. There’s a reason Empire is considered the best of the SW movies. By the time the prequels came around, he had been surrounded by Yes Men and didn’t seem to realize he wasn’t up to telling the story of Anakin’s fall.
The writing for Anakin (I’ll forgive the performance – it wasn’t a five year-old’s fault that they should have started him older) was so horrific that Lucas’ production meetings must have been like Hitler’s bunker in the final days of WWII.
I don’t see an issue with the child Anakin’s performance. It’s the adult Anakin that can’t act.
Lucas wrote The Empire Strikes Back. It was polished by Kasdan, but Lucas wrote the story. Leigh Brackett’s credit is just a courtesy. Lucas also wrote American Graffiti. Read a fucking book.There were no Yes Men, this is a canard. Lucas works by letting his employees be creative and collaborative.
You are correct with 2 exceptions, Ewan and Ian McDiarmid seemed like they were the only ones who understood what movies they were in. But there wasn’t enough Ewan. I can’t wait to see Ewan’s Obi Wan as the focus of the story and not just the foil to the fallen hero.
Ian was good until he went full game/camp, which was certainly entertaining but not good, per se. Ewan I think gets a little too much praise but he certainly acquits himself well based on the material. I think Neeson actually had the best performance of the prequels and it’s a shame he only anchored one movie.The one element of the prequels that holds up on its own merits is John Williams’ scores, which for my money are far better than his sequel scores and come close to matching the magic of the originals. The Anakin/Padme love theme specifically is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music written for the saga.
Ewan and Ian McDiarmid seemed like they were the only ones who understood what movies they were in. But there wasn’t enough Ewan. I can’t wait to see Ewan’s Obi Wan as the focus of the story and not just the foil to the fallen hero.Almost nobody looked good in the prequels with that horrible dialog, except for Ian who transcended the material. Having done ep III he was a seasoned Shakespearian actor by that time, so he knew how to line read his dialog perfectly. He acted circles around everyone else and probably should have been nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar:
Ok see watching this scene again you really can’t blame everything on the dialogue. Even Hayden’s delivery of lines like “What did you say?” are laughably bad especially opposite what Ian’s doing.
True, but at 0:22 Ian has to say this convoluted explanation of the Dark Side that someone less skilled could totally bumble. I’m thinking his experience reciting Shakespeare’s soliloquys aided in navigating the especially verbose parts.
Ian did an audio recording of Paradise Lost in which he played Lucifer and it’s fantastic.
You guys are so tedious. Move on already.
I’ve always said, the prequels aren’t particularly good but the flaws in them are largely just amplified versions of the flaws in the original series. If ol’ George had used co-writers and directors of a similar calibre to the first three I suspect they’d be quite reasonable.The other honest to god truth is that, you can perceive a sense of vision in the prequels. It’s not a particularly compelling vision, and it’s a vision which is genuinely at odds with the popular aspects of the original trilogy from time to time (it’s stupid in a bad way rather than a good way, basically), but you do get a sense of a unified storytelling objective and a single integrated arc. It’s a trilogy where if nothing else you’re confident that there’s someone driving the bus, even if they’re driving it off a cliff. The Disney films are therefore like waking up in a bus that’s already crashed, you can smell gasoline, and you know it’s going to explode soon.It does seem that the value of that has been highlighted by the Disney trilogy, for better or for worse.
(As an aside: do you reckon people would be more willing to forgive the sins of the prequels if the original films were untouched, or at least available? Is it possible that the lack of goodwill comes from that in some way?)
Still hoping against hope that Vader and Obi Wan don’t actually meet and that their scenes together are flashbacks and/or dreams with a pre-suit Anakin.
I had to fix Ewan McGregor’s quote:“To see Hayden back in the role of Anakin, well… it was sort of spine-tingling,” he said. “It was amazing. It was just amazing to see Hayden full-stop. I’m so close to him—we’ve stayed in touch over the years, but we haven’t seen each other for a long time. A long time.”
Chirstensen’s performance in Episode II is what the director wanted and what’s on the page. his performance in episode III is way better, especially the last half of the flick when Anakin done goes batty.
I think the appeal here is really the do-over aspect. We get to find out what these actors can do and what these characters can be like working with a competent director. I’m very curious. Christensen got pretty much screwed over with the prequels, I think it’s cool he gets a second chance. I’d also like to push back on the whole thing of the sequel trilogy being bad because it doesn’t work well as a three-movie narrative. I mean, it clearly doesn’t, but the narrative through-line of the original trilogy doesn’t exactly set a gold standard. I realize the second Death Star was “even more powerful” than the first, but I wouldn’t call that an exciting narrative twist. Really, the sequel trilogy’s issues with story ended up, without intending to do so, mimicking the exact problem with the originals. I am happy to slip into the warm, trance-like comfort of debating these points. It’s been a fucking week.
“Really, the sequel trilogy’s issues with story ended up, without intending to do so, mimicking the exact problem with the originals.”Not at all, but it’d be nice if it were true!
Start out with a basic hero’s journey story complete with missing parents and an aged mentor, expand it in a way that emphasizes moral ambiguity and a fundamentally unhappy ending, then backtrack by slightly reworking the big conflict of the first story in the name of cuddly, risk-adverse crowd pleasing while tying up loose ends in a way that doesn’t quite feel fleshed out enough even if the end of the hero’s journey feels more or less satisfactory. All the original movies are better than their counterparts in the sequels, but TLJ is better than RotJ. You don’t have to agree of course.
“I think the appeal here is really the do-over aspect. We get to find out what these actors can do and what these characters can be like working with a competent director. I’m very curious. Christensen got pretty much screwed over with the prequels, I think it’s cool he gets a second chance.”
Pretty much nailed it
Yeah, Christensen got done dirty and I feel bad that so many people pin so much of the blame for the prequels on him. Like, I haven’t seen much at all of his post-Star Wars work so the dude might actually be a bad actor, but even if he sucks there was so much wrong in those movies that even the best actor couldn’t salvage it.
…once closely allied Jedi friends—now great enemies—reuniting once moreI’m not sure why I find this line so funny, but I keep on laughing at it. I mean it seems pretty clear that the author doesn’t not give a flying crap about Star Wars, but referring to Obi Wan and Anakin as “closely allied Jedi friends” doesn’t even come close to describing their relationship. It sounds like how my mom might describe those “two main characters with laser swords” if I were to ask her when I was younger who were some of the important characters were in the second Star Wars trilogy.
This is the definitive description of Star Wars, and I will not hear otherwise.
Obi Wan and Anakin as “closely allied Jedi friends” doesn’t even come close to describing their relationship.It’s so obvious how close they were when Anakin’s entire life from age five was spent with Obi-Wan.