TV Talk: Pittsburgh native helps ‘Star Wars’ fill in some blanks with ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week:

Disney+’s “Obi Wan Kenobi,” now streaming, seeks to not only fill in a gap in the Skywalker saga, but also to bridge the great divide between older “Star Wars” fans devoted to the original trilogy and younger, millennial viewers who defend the much-maligned prequels. (Disney+ did not make “Obi-Wan Kenobi” available for review in advance of its premiere; new episodes debut each Wednesday.)

“I was just asked a lot (about returning to the role) at the end of every interview I ever did,” McGregor said in a Disney+ virtual teleconference this month. “I think I became more aware of the fondness that the generation that we made the prequels for have for those stories. Because, when we made them, we didn’t hear that. We didn’t get that response, really. Gradually, I started realizing that people really liked them and that they meant a lot to that generation.”

Set about 10 years after the prequels’ Episode III — “Revenge of the Sith,” and before the original trilogy’s Episode IV, “A New Hope,” the six-part “Obi-Wan Kenobi” finds the noble Jedi, played by the prequels’ McGregor, watching over a young Luke Skywalker from a distance on Tatooine. (Prequel players Joel Edgerton and Bonnie Piesse return as Luke’s Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.)

“At the end of (‘Revenge of the Sith’), you know the Jedi order has been destroyed, and those who aren’t killed have gone into hiding and they can’t communicate with one another,” McGregor said. “For 10 years, Obi Wan has been in hiding. He can’t communicate with any of his old comrades. And then he’s living a pretty solitary life. He’s not able to use the Force. So, in a way, he’s lost his faith. It’s like somebody who stepped away from their religion and the only responsibility to his past life is looking over Luke Skywalker.”

Director/executive producer Deborah Chow acknowledged “Obi-Wan” begins in a dark period of the “Star Wars” timeline.

“But, with the character of Kenobi, there’s so much warmth, so much compassion and humor,” Chow said. “He’s a character of light and hope that it was interesting for us to try to keep the balance of the darkness but also still maintain the hope coming from the character.”

McGregor saw it as his job in “Obi-Wan Kenobi” to better connect the Obi-Wan of the prequels with the version of the character introduced by actor Alex Guinness in the first “Star Wars” movie.

“Alec Guinness had this wit behind his eyes all the time,” McGregor said. “He had a twinkle in his eyes. I always try and think of him and try to hear him saying the lines, and that’s why I think the writing was so, so good. Right from the word go, all of (Obi-Wan’s) dialogue felt to me like it could have been Alec Guinness saying it.”

Meanwhile, Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen) has dispatched his evil envoys, including Imperial Inquisitor Reva (Moses Ingram), to do his dark bidding.

“From what I knew of ‘Star Wars,’ this felt dangerous,” said Ingram, a newcomer to the “Star Wars” story. “(Reva is) really smart and, she plays the offense and she’s always 10 steps ahead. She will do everything she can to get the job done to the best of her ability. I was most intrigued by her fervor for what she does.”

To help the cast feel the mood of “Star Wars,” director Deborah Chow would play music by composer John Williams from past “Star Wars” films on set, especially during fight scenes.

“The music will swell,” Ingram said, “and it feels like you’re 10 feet tall.”

For Pittsburgh native Jan Pascale, working as the series’ set decorator — the person responsible for all the items and decor glimpsed in a scene — offered a new challenge. Her past jobs have been in more down-to-Earth settings, including her Oscar-winning work on the Netflix movie “Mank” and the long-delayed “Top Gun: Maverick,” which arrived in theaters the same day “Obi-Wan” premiered on Disney+.

“I had to recreate a lot of Tattooine,” Pascale said in a phone interview Wednesday. “No pressure there to get it right for the fans.”

Pascale, who grew up in Beechview and early in her career worked on the crew of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” in Pittsburgh before relocating to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, recalls going with “Neighborhood” co-workers to see the original 1977 “Star Wars” at a theater in Monroeville.

“We were all just so blown away by it,” she said.

Having worked on a “Star Wars” project, Pascale calls it “one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever done.

“There’s no paper in ‘Star Wars,’ ” she explained. “So when somebody is reading a book, you have to figure out what kind of data pad they were using. You can’t use books on a bookshelf to decorate, so it’s a whole different way of looking at decorating: How do I make clutter in ‘Star Wars’?”

Because everything has to look alien, almost all of the items on set had to be made from scratch.

“Doing a marketplace, it was literally (asking) what do they sell on other planets? It’s a lot of gourds,” she said, chuckling. “There are many gourds for sale in the ‘Star Wars’ universe. It was really fascinating to start looking at things in a different way.”