Ewan McGregor has reflected on the negative critical response to his trilogy of Star Wars movies.
The Scottish actor, who shot to fame in the Nineties with hits including Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, played the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas’s trilogy of Star Wars prequels, from 1999 to 2005. But the movies – which also starred Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen – drew largely unfavourable reviews at the time.
They also became slightly infamous for its near-constant use of CGI technology, and the introduction of the maligned space creature Jar Jar Binks.
Speaking at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where he took part in a live commentary of Trainspotting, McGregor was asked about his relationship to Star Wars when he first signed onto the franchise.
“Deciding to do it was hard,” he said. “Because at that point I was already doing these [artier] films in the early part of my career. I didn’t think of myself as being somebody in that kind of thing. And then the closer I got to it, the more I wanted to do it. But still, I did them, and they were hard because they’re not indie.”
He continued: “I did them, and I enjoyed them, and they were not well received. And so that was weird and hard – to sort of put yourself into something like that, and then for them to be really dragged through the mud by the critics. But I learned a lot about not giving a s***.”
McGregor went on to say that one of the biggest surprises of his Star Wars experience has been discovering the fans who actually did like the prequel movies – 1999’s The Phantom Menace, 2002’s Attack of the Clones and 2005’s Revenge of the Sith – and grew up with them.
“I started meeting people who we made those films for,” he said. “They were children when we made them. And then I started realising that [those films] were loved.”
McGregor went on to reprise the Obi-Wan role in a 2022 limited series for Disney+.
In 2022, McGregor said that he was at first reluctant to appear in the Star Wars movies as he was “full of [himself]” at the time he received the offer.
“It came right after that Trainspotting period and by that time I was so full of myself,” he told the SmartLess podcast. “I am Danny Boyle’s actor. I am f***ing urban grunge. I am the Oasis of the British movie industry,” he joked.
The actor, whose other credits include films as diverse as Moulin Rouge!, Emma, The Impossible and Velvet Goldmine, currently stars in the dinosaur blockbuster The End of Oak Street.
In her four-star review for The Independent, film critic Clarisse Loughrey said the film is “not only better than any of the Jurassic World films, but so much less stiff and fetishistic than the exhaustive line of Eighties ‘love letters’ produced by Stranger Things’ Shawn Levy and his ilk.”
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