A Fellow Star Wars Actor Warned Ewan McGregor Not To Play Obi-Wan Kenobi
As much as "Star Wars" might seem like a clear net-positive for any actor's career, history has shown that it's not always as good as it sounds. Jake Lloyd, who played young Anakin in the first movie, was famously bullied out of acting for his supposedly bad performance. Natalie Portman also struggled to find work after the prequels because her performance as Padme was considered pretty wooden too. Basically everyone involved in these movies is indeed a perfectly fine actor; the problem was just that George Lucas is bad at directing his actors, as shown by how even Christopher Lee and Samuel L. Jackson seemed to performing below their abilites.
Even in the agreed-upon good movies in the franchise, the actors involved could sometimes struggle to find meaty roles later on. Mark Hamill became a much-celebrated voice actor after the original trilogy, while Carrie Fisher carved out a career for herself as a prolific script doctor. Still, there's no denying they were strongly typecast as Luke and Leia, which undoubtedly complicated matters when they tried to find roles in live-action movies and TV shows that went beyond cameos designed to make audiences go, "Hey, remember Leia?"
Among the lesser-known actors to come out "Star Wars" with some regret is Denis Lawson, who played Wedge Antilles in the original trilogy. Antilles certainly gets some love from the more hardcore members of the fandom, but the role itself was fairly thankless and unremarkable. As Lawson's nephew and eventual prequel trilogy star Ewan McGregor remarked in a 2020 interview, "He was always really dismissive of ['Star Wars'] because he did a couple of weeks work, sitting in a cardboard spaceship [...] and yet he had this massive following. It sort of annoyed him."
'Don't do it'
Although Lawson has clarified in other interviews that he doesn't hate the franchise or anything, he has expressed plenty of frustration with how the gig he did for a couple of weeks in the '70s/early '80s has so thoroughly overshadowed his impressive work in other films. ("I get bored with journalists asking me about 'Star Wars' and somehow that has been transposed over into me hating the films," he told the Scottish Field in 2017.) It's a frustration that plenty of artists have struggled with over the years — Michael Keaton of "Batman" fame did a whole movie about it in 2014 — and it's one that Lawson wanted to spare McGregor from. As McGregor recalled:
"He was one of the people who said, 'Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it.' And then the nearer I got to it, the more I wanted to do it."
But while McGregor is still probably best known for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi, it hasn't overshadowed his career to the same extent as his uncle's. From "Fargo" to "Christopher Robin," "Doctor Sleep," and "Birds of Prey," McGregor's given us plenty of fun mainstream roles to talk about over the years. It probably helped that the prequels just weren't as well-received as the original trilogy; whereas everyone loves to reminisce on the films Lawson starred in, most viewers (even "Star Wars" fans themselves) have often been happy to just pretend the prequels never happened.
That hasn't stopped McGregor from getting his own prequel spin-off series, of course, but it has helped him achieve a freedom in his career that other "Star Wars" actors haven't gotten. When asked if he's glad he took on the prequel role back in the '90s, McGregor in 2020 answered immediately: "I'm so glad I did."