“Star Wars” fans rejoiced around the galaxy Friday as a reunion between Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan and Hayden Christensen’s Darth Vader was guaranteed to happen in the show “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” out next year on Disney+.
In a teaser released Friday, McGregor, 50, said that the Jedi Master and the fallen Skywalker will “have another swing at each other” in the highly speculated-about show, one that explores the legacy of the beloved Jedi knight.
“There’s a hunger for [Kenobi] to come back,” McGregor said. “The fans have been waiting long enough, you know?”
The show is set 10 years after the events of “Revenge of the Sith,” which ended with Kenobi going into exile after dismembering Vader on the volcanic planet Mustafar — just as the galactic empire began seizing power, after Sheev Palpatine (played by Ian McDiarmid, 77) executed Order 66, eradicating almost all living Jedi.
Until now, not much has been known about where Obi-Wan was, or what he had done, during the period before he revealed himself to a coming-of-age Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, 70) on Tatooine in “A New Hope.”
“This is quite a dark time we’re coming into with him,” director Deborah Chow, who also directed two “Mandalorian” episodes, said, adding that Kenobi’s mission of protecting Luke is only “a starting place for our story.”
“The interesting thing is going to be where it goes from there…just being a Jedi, it’s not safe. There’s Jedi hunters out there.”
Concept art from that teaser shows that Kenobi will be leaving the desert wasteland of Tatooine to journey around several new planets and civilizations in the galaxy — places he may run into his former pupil who was seduced by the dark side of the force.
“We couldn’t tell the story of Obi-Wan Kenobi without addressing Anakin or Vader,” Chow said.
In the connected “Star Wars” universe, Christensen, 40, will also be reprising Darth Vader in “The Mandalorian” spinoff “Ahsoka,” which stars Rosario Dawson, 42, as his former Padawan learner, Ahsoka Tano.
It seems nobody is more excited than McGregor to be back in the “Star Wars” world with his former prequel castmate.
“The most beautiful thing of all is that [Kenobi] brought me back together with Hayden,” McGregor said, adding that their on-screen encounter “might be quite satisfying for everybody.”
