In 2011, Ewan McGregor recounted the filming of the last scene of “Revenge of the Sith” and he was completely lost in the Star Wars universe! It must be said that the green background doesn’t help!
When you’re an actor, shooting on a green screen is sometimes a difficult exercise. You have to use your imagination to the maximum to forget that there is nothing around you and that you are filming in a completely empty warehouse which will become a fantastic and never-before-seen universe once you have gone through the special effects.
And on the set of the Star Wars prelogy, Ewan McGregor paid the price!
Guest of the show The Jonathan Ross Show in 2011, the Scottish actor was questioned about having shot the Star Wars prequel, which was one of the first films to rely heavily on the use of the green screen. . Without a set, without a prop, the actor had a hard time knowing what he was doing!
The example he takes takes place at the end of Revenge of the Sith, Episode III of the saga. Obi-Wan arrives on the back of Eopie on Tatooine to hand over baby Luke, child of Anakin and Padmé, to those who will raise him: Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. Except that he is carrying a plastic baby, that the creature is an immobile green cardboard, Tatooine a warehouse painted green, and that he has to look at the two suns supposed to be in the sky, but which are also a green background!
Lucasfilm Ltd. Obi-Wan against a green background… on Tatooine!
The actor therefore describes each step of this very embarrassing scene, getting the name of Luke’s adoptive parents wrong (“Uncle Peru, no, it’s Aunt Peru!”) and says that Lucas asks him to look at “the moons” when it is of course the two suns of Tatooine. This shows that the actors of our favorite sagas sometimes know them less than the fans.
Lucasfilm Ltd.
Luke handed over to Aunt Beru
When we imagine that this great moment of solitude on a green screen took place for Ewan McGregor in front of his close friends to whom he had sold that he was going to shoot that day “an important scene” of Star Wars, we understand all the more the embarrassment he may have felt on the set, and which he visibly still felt almost ten years later!