Veteran actor Ewan McGregor is known for portraying the character of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the iconic Star Wars franchise since 1999. Starring alongside numerous actors and their characters, McGregor had one heck of a time shooting the Star Wars films.
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 actress Natalie Portman took on the role of Padme Amidala in Star 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In a magazine interview with Star Wars Insider (that has since been archived), Portman talked about what it was like acting in front of the blue/green screen.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!
“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”
Well said indeed. Although Portman has a connection to blue-screen acting, her co-star Ewan McGregor doesn’t agree with her on this point. In a separate interview, the Moulin Rouge actor 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 (via Far 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,”
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’s 1999 film Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace received average ratings of 6.5/10 on IMDB and 52% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Star Wars franchise is available to stream on Disney+ in the U.S.
