Joel Edgerton Looks Back at ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’, and George Lucas’ Contribution to His Career After Casting Him in ‘Attack of the Clones’
Joel Edgerton, who returned to the Star Wars galaxy last year for another round as Owen Lars in Obi-Wan Kenobi, is currently promoting his upcoming film Master Gardener. While talking to NME, the actor credited George Lucas for casting him in Attack of the Clones over 20 years ago, as he sees that as the launching point for his career.
It’s interesting how 10 years after Disney acquired Lucasfilm, Edgerton is practically the first person associated with the franchise and not named Dave Filoni to publicly bring up the creator’s name. Here’s what he had to say:
“I owe so much in my career to George [Lucas] giving me that job: it opened all the doors to Hollywood. It allowed everyone in L.A. to kind of welcome me and go, ‘Oh, he’s in Star Wars. Let’s give him an audition for other things’. So I put aside any of my reticence [about returning] and I saw it as a way to complete a circle of some kind.”
Egerton also confessed that he was a bit unsure at first about coming back to the role as he thought there wasn’t much more that could be done with Owen:
“To be honest, I was a little bit… not snobbish, but reticent in regards to going, ‘I’ve done this before’. I’ve always joked that Uncle Owen is the most boring character in Star Wars history because he’s a moisture farmer and he doesn’t get to wield a lightsaber. And I’m always cheeky about the way I talk about Uncle Owen!”
And yet, when given the scripts, Egerton still felt like he could add more to the character with a more nuanced performance than before:
“Everybody thinks that Uncle Owen is a grumbly, cantankerous ‘say no’ dude. I was like, ‘This is my opportunity to put a bit more context on that, and have people maybe like him a little bit more’. And I think we did that. Also, my one caveat to them was, ‘I know what you’re planning with the story and how it unfolds, and I’m not asking for more screen time, I just want to do something cool. Can I at least have one fight? Can I at least throw my hessian sleeves up and get into one brawl?’”
And that came true. The final episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi featured a now-infamous sequence of Moses Ingram’s Reva chasing down Luke on Tatooine, with Owen and Beru doing their best to defend him. While it’s been widely criticized on the Internet, Joel Edgerton was actually quite excited to shoot it, as he explained:
“I was like, ‘I have never had a fight with a woman before on screen’. And I sort of – spoilers aside – get to lose. How cool is that?”
A second season of Obi-Wan Kenobi remains up in the air, though it seems less and less likely every day. Ewan McGregor repeated at Celebration he would still like to come back to the role, but nothing concrete has come of it so far. Season 1 was directed by Deborah Chow and is now available on Disney Plus.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
