‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ Writer Reveals They ‘Pulled Back’ Terrifying Darth Vader Scene

The “Obi-Wan Kenobi” Disney+ series gave fans another look at Darth Vader, who is terrifying compared to what fans got a glimpse of in the original trilogy.

Darth Vader, again played by Hayden Christensen from the prequel trilogy, sees Darth Vader set on hunting down his former master Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) by any means necessary. Although Anakin Skywalker had brutally murdered younglings in the prequel trilogy, torturing and killing several helpless civilians just to intimidate Obi-Wan Kenobi seems to set a new bar for how evil the Sith Lord has become.

Not only did Vader snap the necks of children, but he also tortured Kenobi by dragging him through the flames, letting him burn as Kenobi had once left him to burn back on Mustafar. It’s a pretty terrifying scene – especially for kids – but, in an interview with Vanity Fair, writer Joby Harold revealed that they had to scale it back from what they had initially intended.

Joby Harold said “it was a thousand percent the intention” to compare Darth Vader in “Obi-Wan Kenobi” to Darth Vader in 2016’s “Rogue One,” which can be seen above.

“From a Vader point of view, we're all living with the memory of the end of Rogue One, and how effective that was,” he explained. “It was very gratifying to see Vader finally be unleashed in a sequence like that, so we wanted to try to trump it if we could. It was a lot more extreme, at one point.”

“I got pulled back a little bit on that,” he continued, but noted that “it was so important to define Vader's anger and rage.”

“There's an emotionality to the choices he's making that are a little further than we're used to seeing with Vader,” Harold explained. “He's pushed a little more than the Vader we know. Obi-Wan isn't the finished article before [the original Star Wars], and we can look at Vader in the same way.”

Harold said that Darth Vader was “emotionally invested in that hunt to the same degree that Obi-Wan's emotionally invested in running away.”

“What a tremendous vehicle to try to articulate rage when you have Darth Vader on the board and you have that silhouette,” he continued. “It is a scary sequence, but it was entirely by design and it had to be because everyone's running from something that's terrifying.”

What makes the scene all the more suspenseful is that Vader’s emotions are hidden behind his helmet. However, Harold says “That just makes him all the more intriguing.”

“As he's going down the street and doing those things, he's doing them to draw the Jedi out,” he explained. “We've established the language: the Jedi hunt themselves—because they cannot stand by and watch innocents be killed. So Vader is very cognizant of what he's doing as he's walking down that street. The horror of the moment has an emotional weight because it's calculated.”

“And to your point, you don't get to see the emotion beneath the stoicism of the silhouette,” he continued. “So it creates something that's really scary. Plus the mix is great in that scene. The sound design is very effective. You are just hearing the breath and the footsteps and seeing the light of the red saber getting close. It’s the feeling of being hunted by that which hates you. It's terrible.”

Since Darth Vader doesn’t say much, Joby Harold revealed that fans have to look to his actions to speak for themselves.

“His choice is revealing the character beneath and the torture beneath—the pain inflicted and the eye-for-an-eye of it all,” he explained. “It’s a chance to hint at something beneath the mask. Vader can't be talking about, you know, his feelings. So it has to be in action. That comes from dragging people down the street behind you to try to pull the Jedi out of hiding, and that comes in inflicting the same pain upon the Jedi that he did to you.”

“It's awful, but he should be awful,” he added. “He's Darth Vader.”

New episodes of “Obi-Wan Kenobi” are released every Wednesday on Disney+.