Posted in: Disney+, Movies, Star Wars, Star Wars, TV | Tagged: In the Land of Saints and Sinners, liam neeson, Obi Wan Kenobi, star wars, Tales of the Jedi, the phantom menace
Despite his Obi-Wan Kenobi cameo, Liam Neeson explains why he won’t be returning as Qui-Gon Jinn for any live-action Star Wars projects.
Liam Neeson would probably like to take as many opportunities away from revenge thrillers as he can get. One of those opportunities has recently come his way in the form of Seth MacFarlane’s upcoming The Naked Gun remake which also helped reinvent Leslie Nielsen’s career into comedy that started with projects like Airplane! (1980) and TV’s Police Squad, on which The Naked Gun films were based. The other major opportunity came in the form of Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn, which he originally played in 1999’s The Phantom Menace, the first episodic film of the Star Wars Skywalker Saga. While his character met his unfortunate end, he was able to reprise the role three times in the Disney era with a voiceover in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, the final Skywalker Saga film, Tales of the Jedi animated anthology series, and on a live-action front in the A New Hope (1977) prequel limited series Obi-Wan Kenobi for Disney+ that say his cameo as a Force ghost. The actor, who’s promoting his film In the Land of Saints and Sinners, opened up on the possibility of making another live-action return.
Liam Neeson Feels He’s Too Old to Do Another Qui-Gon Jinn Live-Action Star Wars Appearance
“I enjoyed very much being with Ewan [McGregor] and [director] George Lucas on ‘The Phantom Menace,'” Neeson told Screen Rant, but affirming he’s okay reprising voiceover roleover. “We shot that 26 years ago! Would I do it again? I don’t think so. Too ******* old, ya know? I can’t see the situation, I really can’t, you know?” Maybe it’s news to him, or he just doesn’t care, but death and age never stopped actors from being recreated at whatever age in the timeline they needed to be with the example of Rogue One (2016) with the estate of Peter Cushing agreeing to have his likeness and a soundalike used to recreate his Grand Moff Tarkin. A combination of CG and a stand-in were combined from archival footage of the late actor to achieve his look around 1977. The late Carrie Fisher then consented to her likeness to recreate her incarnation of Princess Leia Organa with repurposed archive audio from the original trilogy used to deliver her final line for the Gareth Edwards film. On the TV side, Mark Hamill also consented to use a similar process to recreate his likeness circa 1983’s Return of the Jedi for The Mandalorian along with voice cloning technology from ReSpeecher that allowed him to sound like his younger self. The same firm was also used in the McGregor-starred Obi-Wan Kenobi for Darth Vader actor James Earl Jones, not sound like a man in his 90s.
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