“I don't know anyone named Obi-Wan, but old Ben lives out beyond the Dune Sea. He's kind of a strange old hermit.” 

That's how Luke Skywalker first describes the aging, reclusive Jedi in 1977's original Star Wars—and Ewan McGregor has now revealed just how much of an outcast the character almost was in the 2022 Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series.

The Disney+ show was set in the years between Revenge of the Sith and that original film, A New Hope, and it showed McGregor's middle-aged galactic refugee toiling in a low-level butcher shop while maintaining his watch over young Luke from afar. In a new interview with Vanity Fair's Adam Lance Garcia, the actor shared some of the discarded ideas for the show, including one that would have made Kenobi a much more pathetic figure in the rough and tumble desert world of Tatooine.

“The first episode used to start with me as a waiter in a bar. He's really lost his way, Obi-Wan,” McGregor says. “He's drinking too much. I got beaten up. People are kicking me, and I'm just taking it, then stalking out into the night. That was our first idea, anyway."

McGregor also walked through scenes from Trainspotting, his twin roles from the second season of Fargo, and his new role on the series A Gentleman in Moscow, but he went especially deep on his time as Kenobi, both in the series and the earlier trilogy of prequels directed by George Lucas. 

“It's been a huge journey being part of Star Wars and for the longest time after the prequels came out, there was no social media, there was no direct communication other than critics,” McGregor said. “It was such a massive film to shoot and then for it to come out and to be really panned was hard. I had no experience of that. That was all a bit of a confusion. So when [Revenge of the Sith] finished, I was off. I was just like, ‘See you later.’ I didn't think too much about it.”

He treasured his colleagues on those movies, but not the painful reaction they received. “It was years later that everyone starts [praising them],” McGregor said. “There's Instagram, there's Twitter, there's whatever, and every day I'm seeing people going, ‘When are you doing another Obi-Wan?’ And I realized, oh my God, there's this real desire. I was surprised. And also I thought it was quite funny that it was just every day.”

Journalists began regularly asking him the same question. “The end of every interview was like, will you be playing Obi-Wan?' There was no plan. No one had ever talked to me about it. Ultimately it got so embarrassing. I was constantly saying, ‘Yeah, I’d be up for it. And then it was like weeks of [people saying,] 'He's up for it! He's going to do it!' And everyone reading in too much into what I'd said.”

A return as Kenobi only became possible when he met with Lucasfilm's previous head of story Kiri Hart about six years ago. “We sat down in an office and she just said, 'You're saying that you would like to do it again, and all we want to know, really, is—do you mean it? 'And I said, I'm glad to have this opportunity to say yes, I would love to do it again,” McGregor says.

“We were talking about a movie at that point, not a TV series,” he adds. “Disney+ wasn't there yet. I said, all I can see is him broken after some time after Episode III and he's in a really dark place.”

In addition to describing the discarded opening, McGregor delved into the ending of the Obi-Wan Kenobi series after rewatching his duel with Hayden Christensen, his prequel costar, in full regalia as the mutilated and mechanized Darth Vader. “It wasn't really written so emotionally, I don't think. But there was something about seeing Hayden and something about working with Hayden again in that state, that made me feel—it took me by surprise, as much as anyone else," McGregor says. 

He wasn't the only one who got emotional. “It's a testament to the love people have for him that whenever Hayden came on set, there was just hundreds of people. You could have heard a pin drop. It was amazing," McGregor says. “People were crying at the monitors. It was really amazing.”