Obi-Wan Kenobi star Ewan McGregor has shared a video condemning the “horrendous, racist DMs” sent to his co-star Moses Ingram, who plays Reva Sevander aka the Third Sister in the Disney+ series.
Ingram took to Instagram on Tuesday to share some of the racist messages she’s received since Obi-Wan Kenobi aired last weekend. In response, in a video shared on the official Star Wars Twitter account, McGregor said the DMs “broke his heart,” and that anyone sending messages like that was “no Star Wars fan” in his mind.
Here’s the video, which has received 40,000 retweets and over 3.5 million views at the time of writing:
We’ve transcribed McGregor’s message in full below:
“This weekend Star Wars fans made Obi-Wan Kenobi the most watched Disney+ original series premiere of all time — and for that I would say a big thank you, and it just goes to show what this family can do when we all pull together.
“However, it seems that some of the fanbase from this influential fanbase have decided to attack Moses Ingram online, and send her the most horrendous, racist DMs. And I heard some of them this morning and it just broke my heart.
Moses is a brilliant actor, she’s a brilliant woman, and she’s absolutely amazing in this series. She brings so much to the series, she brings so much to the franchise, and it just sickened me to my stomach to hear that this had been happening. I just wanted to say, as the leading actor in the series, as the executive producer on the series, that we stand with Moses.
We love Moses. And if you’re sending her bullying messages, you’re no Star Wars fan in my mind. There’s no place for racism in this world. And I totally stand with Moses.”
As well as sharing McGregor’s video, the official Star Wars account also posted a message supporting Ingram.
“There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy,” they wrote in a follow-up tweet, “don’t choose to be a racist.”
What’s more, Ingram told The Independent in a recent interview that Lucasfilm warned her about possible racist harassment online as a Black woman joining the Star Wars galaxy.
This isn’t the first time the Star Wars franchise has faced a racism scandal. Actor Kelly Marie Tran, who starred as Rose Tico in the recent trilogy, left social media in 2018 before writing a New York Times essay about the hate she received online. John Boyega, meanwhile, criticised Disney directly for the way the franchise treated his character Finn.
“What I would say to Disney is do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side,” he told GQ in 2020. “It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up.”
