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Veteran actor Ewan McGregor is known for portraying the character of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the iconicStar Warsfranchise since 1999. Starring alongside numerous actors and their characters, McGregor had one heck of a time shooting theStar Warsfilms.
However, it wasn’t all fun and games since McGregor revealed that he had to shoot against blue/green screens for the CGI. Being a relatively new technology during the early 2000s, McGregor differed from his co-star Natalie Portman’s views on the topic of blue screen acting.
Ewan McGregor And Natalie Portman Cannot Agree On One Thing!
Back in 1999, Oscar-winning actressNatalie Portmantook on the role of Padme Amidala inStar Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.Starring alongside McGregor, Liam Neeson, Jake Lloyd, and several others, the film received average success and Portman got to act in front of a blue screen.
In a magazine interview withStar Wars Insider(that has since been archived), Portman talked about what it was like acting in front of the blue/green screen. Being a relatively new concept in the early 2000s, Portman had nothing but praise for modern technology. The actress faced a challenge that she really liked and went so far as to call blue-screen acting as the purest form of acting!
“I’m not super-serious about my work”: How Natalie Portman Prepared for Her Star Wars Role Will Add Fuel to the Fire for Padmé Amidala Haters
“Working in front of a blue screen is the hardest kind of acting, because everything is in your imagination. In front of a blue screen, you have to imagine everything—your setting around you, sometimes even characters. It’s a very difficult skill to learn how to look at a character that’s not there, and his voice may be coming from a completely different direction.”
She further continued,
“Having been through the experience of making The Phantom Menace and then seeing it, that made things different. It’s imagination—that’s why blue screen acting is maybe the purest form of acting, because it’s like being a little kid in a cardboard box and thinking it’s a spaceship. That’s the point you have to get to—pure imagination”
“It got inappropriate very quickly”: The Attack of the Clones Scene That Made Things Super Awkward Between Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen
Well said indeed. Although Portman has a connection to blue-screen acting, her co-starEwan McGregordoesn’t agree with her on this point. In a separate interview, theMoulin Rougeactor talked about how the challenge of acting against a blue screen was very hard and that he didn’t enjoy it!
Ewan McGregor Did Not Like Acting Against A Blue Screen!
During a press tour some years back, veteran actor Ewan McGregor was talking about modern technology and how far they had come. While talking about CGI and VFX, McGregor stated that he did not enjoy working against a blue screen at all (viaFar Out Magazine)
““[George] wanted to max out that technology, but that meant for us that we were very much on blue screens and green screens, and it was hard work,”
“Man, I want to make a movie like that”: Even With Star Wars and Indiana Jones, George Lucas’ Greatest Career Regret is an Ewan McGregor War Movie
Sadly, the failure of these movies added salt to the wound since McGregor essentially did the hard work of acting with a blue screen only for it to fail. Good or bad, it is a fact that CGI has helped movies gain even more popularity and brought a sense of realism to these space battles or wars on distant planets.
On the other hand, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman’s1999filmStar Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menacereceived average ratings of 6.5/10 on IMDB and 52% on Rotten Tomatoes.TheStar Warsfranchise is available to stream on Disney+ in the U.S.
Visarg Acharya
Senior Writer
Articles Published :3265
Visarg Acharya is a Senior Writer at FandomWire, majorly focusing on movies, with over 3000 articles published. He has been an entertainment journalist for the past three years and a copywriter at a corporation. Visarg usually covers news and theories on the MCU and the DCU, with an emphasis on Avengers and Superman; Game of Thrones, and more.A Tarantino fan, Visarg, spends his time critiquing various directors’ filmographies and watching them with curiosity. Medieval fantasy like The Lord of the Rings or sci-fi movies like Interstellar, watching the latest horror movies, and listening to Hans Zimmer become his comfort zone. When idle, he can be found reading fantasy novels with a terrible cup of coffee in hand.
