The creative team of ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ has long hesitated to bring Darth Vader back

Entertainment Weekly has published a lengthy article full of quotes from the actors and the creative team of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Here are the more interesting ones:

• Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy on the replacement of writer Hossein Amini by Joby Harold: “We’re looking, ultimately, to make a hopeful, uplifting story. And it’s tricky when you’re starting with a character in the state that Obi-Wan would be in coming off of Revenge of the Sith. That’s a pretty bleak period of time. You can’t just wave the magic wand with any writer and arrive at a story that necessarily reflects what you want to feel.”

• Harold on Obi-Wan’s arc in the series: “When we last saw Obi-Wan in the prequels, he’s very emotional. There’s a passion to him. And when we get to see him again in A New Hope, he is the Zen master. That was the story that I wanted to understand — what had happened to Obi-Wan between the guy that Ewan [McGregor] had brought to life and the guy that Sir Alec Guinness brought to life.”

• Kennedy on the decision to bring Darth Vader back: “The debate around whether we should do that or not carried on for quite some time. Everybody within our creative team has strong opinions, and all of our fans have strong opinions. So when you realize that you’re under that level of scrutiny, certainly a story point like that is going to be scrutinized at a very high level. We talked about it constantly.”

• Harold on Hayden Christensen’s return as Vader: “It was so important to have Hayden be a part of this project because he is such a massive part of that character. It was a priority to all of us that we did it with as much care as possible, so as to honor one of the greatest villains and antagonists in the history of entertainment.”

• Director Deborah Chow on the series’ deep connection with the Prequel Trilogy: “The strongest connective tissue for us is to the prequels, because that’s where our characters are coming from and that’s where their stories started. So, really, the prequels are the most connected to our series.”

• Chow on the unlikelihood of a second season: “It was definitely conceived as a limited series, and it is one big story with a beginning, middle, and end. The approach has always been that it is one full story.”

• Kennedy adds: “It’s certainly something we talk about, mainly because everybody came together and had such an incredible time. Ewan had an incredible time. Hayden had an incredible time. So certainly from that point of view, everybody involved would love to see this not end. But we have to really spend our time asking the question: Why would we do it? If we were to decide to do anything more with the Obi-Wan character, we’d have to really answer the question why?”

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