How did I get here?
An Introduction
I didn’t really know who Ewan McGregor was until I was well into my twenties. Many of my peers watched the Star Wars prequels when they were children. I didn’t. My first, and for years only, experience with Star Wars was when I watched the original trilogy on VHS in a single night when I was six years old. This was at my godbrothers’ (my godmother’s sons’) insistence. It wasn’t just the joy of Star Wars they wanted to share with me. No, the main reason they sat on me and made me watch the original trilogy was because next, they wanted to show me Spaceballs, and they wanted me to understand the references.
That night, unfortunately, changed my life. Not so much Spaceballs, which I’ve seen twice in my life total. The most recent time was when I was thirteen. It was the end of the school year, testing was done but we still had to go to class, and my math teacher said we could bring in movies of our own to watch. One boy had the dastardly idea to exploit the “no films rated PG-13 or higher” loophole, and our math teacher agreed to put it on, having never watched it himself.
I believe it was the, “She’s gone from suck…to blow,” line that finally made the man look up.
“What is this rated?” he asked.
“PG,” assured the boy who’d brought it in.
Satisfied, our teacher looked back down.
“In 1987,” the boy muttered.
It’s one of Mel Brooks’s most poorly received movies, I believe, but I remember it being fine. Upon my first viewing at age six, a lot of the jokes and references still flew over my head. But this Star Wars thing, well…I thought at first that I would hate it. I thought it would be something for boys. My godbrothers’ main selling point that convinced me was that it had a princess in it. I finally caved on hearing that, and I enjoyed the movies a lot more than I wanted to let on. The original trilogy still holds a kind of complicated but really special place in my heart.
This was 1998, right before the prequels came out. My godbrothers were hoping I’d like the original trilogy enough to watch these new movies with them. It ended up not happening.
I was fully onboard with everything until Jabba the Hutt showed up in Return of the Jedi, and I was instantly and deeply traumatized. It messed me up so bad that when the credits finally rolled, my older godbrother turned to me with a huge grin on his face, having just successfully shared this thing he held so dear with me, and said, “So? What did you think?”
“Don’t ever talk to me about these movies again,” I snapped.
He didn’t give up right away. “Come on, the new ones will be completely different. They won’t have anything to do with any of these characters, none of them were even alive yet,” he insisted. “It’s a completely different story. Jabba the Hutt won’t be in them. Why would he be? That wouldn’t make sense!”
He almost had me convinced to see The Phantom Menace in theaters. Until I saw a TV spot featuring Jabba the Hutt’s cameo appearance.
I put my foot down. I screamed. I cried. The words “you can’t make me” were uttered. Everyone roundly decided this was not a battle worth fighting with me and gave up.
Despite the marketing blitz on and off over the next four years, I didn’t really think about Star Wars very often after that. The first three movies did pop up in my head from time to time though, and I discovered that after that single triple feature, they’d been seared into my mind almost in their entirety.
But I didn’t truly revisit Star Wars for about twenty years. I was an adult, and I understood that Jabba the Hutt was a fictional character. It seemed about as good a time as any to take the plunge again before The Force Awakens came out. And in anticipation, I finally sat down and watched the prequels from beginning to end. That was the first time I remember seeing Ewan McGregor in anything.
I plan to talk about his performance and the prequels more in depth when we get to them. But suffice to say, this is one of the many ways in which that sleepover with my godbrothers two and a half decades ago changed my life. There’s a straight line from their futile attempt to have me understand my first Mel Brooks movie as a six-year-old to me as a thirty-year-old sitting at my laptop, typing these words, starting this project to try to exorcise my obsession with Ewan McGregor.
Because after I watched the prequels I stumbled upon a clip of Ewan singing “Your Song” from Moulin Rouge! and was promptly convinced to watch the whole thing. To quote Angelina Meehan from the podcast Musicalsplaining: “It’s Paris at the turn of the century, and Obi-Wan Kenobi is here and he is beautiful.” If that sentence doesn’t convince you to watch it, I don’t know what will.
I’ll also go more in depth on it when we get to it. But I will say, as I was watching it for the first time, I could already tell how much I would love it. It’s one of my favorite films of all time. I’ve pushed it on coworkers and on friends, and they’ve all had a great time with it. And it ruined my life.
I’ve heard multiple people over the years tell the same story that happened to me: The first time I saw Ewan McGregor sing “Your Song,” the scales fell from my eyes. Nicole Kidman said he must have sung it to her over five hundred times over the course of rehearsing and filming, and she never got tired of it. And honestly, same.
Over the years though, I moved on to other things. Moulin Rouge! remained a favorite that I regularly revisited. I finally accepted that although the prequels take up an inordinate amount of my brainspace, I really don’t actually like them. The Rise of Skywalker came out, and it was bad. I really genuinely loved The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. And after I had some time to process it, Rise broke my dang heart.
“Don’t ever talk to me about these movies again,” I snapped. But even so, I thought, there were still new Star Wars projects on the horizon, and there might once more come a day when I’d learn to love Star Wars again.
And then the pandemic hit. Over the several years leading up to it, most of the new movies I’d watched were soulless, cynical, Disney remake cashgrabs that just left me feeling stupid or depressed or angry or exhausted. I’d become extremely jaded about the concept of movies, and I hadn’t even realized it. I had reached a point where I sat down expecting to be disappointed.
But with theaters closed and upcoming releases put on hold, my desperate need for escapism drove me to rediscover old favorites as well as find new-to-me movies. I watched classic films I’d never gotten around to seeing before. I took fairly deep dives into foreign and independent films. I watched movie after movie made by people who gave a damn, who had something to say, and I was reminded of what movies could be. What they could do. How they could make you feel. 2020 was a nightmare year. But it was also the year I got the chance to fall back in love with film.
Despite my lingering fondness for the original trilogy that I don’t think will ever truly die, I pretty much came to terms with the fact that I’d outgrown Star Wars. And I certainly wasn’t interested in any new Star Wars. Rogue One and Solo had also left me cold, and I just didn’t feel the need to return to something that would inevitably make me feel empty, at best.
But then Obi-Wan Kenobi was finally announced. And I felt so done. I didn’t know if I’d watch it at all, and I knew if I did, I wouldn’t watch it right away. And I didn’t. I heard a lot of mixed reactions, but mostly positive things, in my sphere. A friend–the same friend who gifted me Moulin Rouge! on DVD when I wouldn’t shut up about it, incidentally–encouraged me, essentially, to get back out there and give love another chance. And ultimately, it was my fondness for Ewan McGregor that softened my cold dead heart and gave me the final push.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is the latest thing Ewan McGregor has been in, as of this writing. For now, all I’ll say is that overall, I didn’t care for it. Turns out, I wasn’t ready to be hurt again.
But. It has reignited my crush on Ewan McGregor in a bad way.
Since I’ve watched it, I’ve remembered how much I enjoy him as an actor. I’ve been exploring more and more of his filmography, and I keep adding more films of his to my To-Watch list, and I finally decided it was only a matter of time and I may as well just fully commit to the whole thing and get this all out of my system. Because he’s an underrated, extremely versatile and talented actor who has made some fascinating choices with the things he’s said yes to, and his career is more than Obi-Wan Kenobi. And also because he’s hot and I deserve to have some absurd yet structured fun.
As of August 2022, Ewan McGregor has 90 credits listed on IMDb, an average of three releases a year for thirty years. That seems like a lot. Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched a lot of films, many of them incredible. But I’ve also watched a truly ridiculous number of vampire and/or werewolf movies, Beauty and Beast and The Phantom of the Opera adaptations, and Ramin Karimloo bootlegs. It might take me some time, but I can do this. Who said pandemic hyperfixations were over?
And if I’m committing to this, I may as well publicly document it. Otherwise, it doesn’t count.
I plan to go in chronological order, starting with his earliest credited appearance in 1993. There are some things on this list that I’ll be revisiting that I’m excited for, and others I’m dreading. There are some first-time watches I’m really looking forward to, and others I’m already wishing I could skip.
Join me, won’t you? Let’s see if this ends up working as a form of aversion therapy and I finally get to a point where I can’t stand looking at his face anymore. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ll all fall a little bit more in love with a man I’ve never met.
This is Ewan Me, and I’m sorry.
Ewan Me: The Project Where I Chronicle My Attempt to Watch Every Entry of Ewan McGregor's Filmography to See If I Can 