Everyone knows that there are die-hardStar Warsfans out there would give anything to be part of the space opera franchise, and it looks like some of them had their wish granted. Real-life superfans of the saga were used as background extras in the Disney+Obi-Wan Kenobiseries. Maya Erskine, who appears alongside Ewan McGregor in the highly anticipated show, revealed her experiences about working on the show while speaking on theJust for Variety Podcast, and revealed that numerous fans of the franchise were used in the actual production.
Obi-Wan Kenobi will see the return ofEwan McGregoras the Jedi after nearly twenty years. Last seen in the climax of the prequel trilogy,Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the new series will bridge the gap between the fateful events on Mustafar that saw McGregor’s Obi-Wan take onHayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker in an epic duel that resulted in Skywalker becoming the iconic franchise villain, Darth Vader. While it had been assumed by many that the pair had not crossed path’s again until their meeting on the Death Star in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the new series will reveal that this was not the case.
Star Wars has always had a huge and very avid fanbase, ever since those iconic titles rolled up the screen for the first time in 1977, so the inclusion of fans in the production is not a surprise, especially the kind of fans who allow the franchise to take over their lives as they cover their bodies in tattoos and their homes in shelves upon shelves of memorabilia, built life size droid replicas and turn their kitchen into a Tattooine bar. According to Erskine’s comments, these are the kind of the top level fan that found themselves on set to become a part of Star Wars history.Pen15star Erskine said:
“The extras were incredible on the set, and a lot of them were mega Star Wars fans. One guy, he was so nice and he lifted up his sleeves and had Star Wars tattoos over his whole body. And they build droids. There are lot of Star Wars fans that build droids, and then the production companies will rent [them] from the fans.”
The news that Obi-Wan Kenobi brought fans into the production is not the first time this has happened, and it shows exactly how much of a shift there has been over the years towards the embracing of franchise fans over the years. It would have been unthinkable to have fans running around the set of the Return of The Jedi, or even the prequel movies, but recently The Mandalorian took a dip into the fan pool to cast a number of Star Wars lovers as extras in that production. One thing this could mean is that there are some regular people out there with some inside knowledge about the series, but like everyone else involved they will have to keep it to themselves until the series arrives on Disney+ sometime in 2022.
