Posted in: Disney+, Preview, Star Wars, streaming, TV | Tagged: bleeding cool, Boston, cable, england, Ewan McGregor, kenobi, Massachusetts, obi-wan, preview, star wars, streaming, television, tv, uk

Star Wars: Kenobi Is Filming in Boston- And Isn't Filming in Boston

So we've got some bad news for Boston citizens, good news for Boston citizens, and pretty much status quo for "Star Wars" fans looking forward to the Ewan McGregor-starring Star Wars: Kenobi (w/t?). So remember how the series was supposed to film in Boston beginning January 4? Well, it looks like it's still happening- but in Boston in England and not Massachusetts. Boston's CBS affiliate WBZ TV reported that the posting from the Film & Television Industry Alliance on productionlist.com was updated to "Boston, England, United Kingdom, and London." This means the Kenobi crew will be dragging their equipment to the small Lincolnshire port located about 100 miles north of London, and not the city of the Celtics, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and a really great Kings of Leon concert we went to a few years back.

According to the project's summary, "Tatooine-a harsh desert world where farmers toil in the heat of two suns while trying to protect themselves and their loved ones from the marauding Tusken Raiders. A backwater planet on the edge of civilized space. And an unlikely place to find a Jedi Master in hiding, or an orphaned infant boy on whose tiny shoulders rests the future of a galaxy."

Here's a look back at what the fine folks behind CBS' The Late Show with Stephen Colbert put together as their pitch for what would've been an excellent opening credits scene for a U.S. Boston-filmed series- set to the tune of a certain classic, bar-set NBC sitcom ("Hiding away in the Outer Rim/Takes everything you've got / Hiding away from all those Jedi/And your garbage can robot"):

Preparing for a series he says is "a long time coming," McGregor revealed in an interview with Empire earlier this year that he's more excited to play the iconic character now than he was in the last two prequel films. "I'm more excited about doing this one than I was doing the second and third one that we did before," the actor explained. One of the reasons for the excitement: his director. "I'm just excited about working with Deborah Chow [director], and the storylines are going to be really good I think. I'm just excited to play him again. It's been long enough since I played him before," said McGregor.

McGregor's also looking forward to getting some time filming on The Volume, the high-resolution video wall tech that allows for large-scale artificial environment creation used by The Mandalorian. "The first three [Star Wars films] I did were really at the very beginning of digital photography," the actor explains. "We had a camera with an umbilical cord to a tent, it was like back to the beginning of movies where the camera didn't move very much because there was so much hardware attached to it. Now we're going to be able to really create stuff without swathes of green-screen and blue-screen, which becomes very tedious for the actor."

Director Deborah Chow moves from directing episodes of The Mandalorian to directing the entire run of the series with directorial "geek cred" that also includes American Gods, Better Call Saul, Lost in Space, Jessica Jones, Reign, and Mr. Robot. In April, Joby Harold (Army of the Dead) was tapped to replace Hossein Amini (Drive) after reports surfaced that Lucasfilm president and Obi-Wan producer Kathleen Kennedy was dissatisfied with Amini's scripts. Allegedly, Kennedy was concerned that having the lead character serve as a mentor to a young Luke and/or Leia skewed too close to The Mandalorian-The Child aka "Baby Yoda" dynamic.

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