‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ Star Indira Varma Is Over Being Typecast

If you’ve been following Indira Varma’s rise, it won’t surprise you that the actor is candid about not being the biggest Star Wars fan growing up, just as she wasn’t a huge Game of Thrones aficionado when she booked a role on the blockbuster HBO show. “I feel like I say in interviews that I didn’t know anything about Game of Thrones before joining, or I didn’t know anything about Star Wars. No, of course I did—you’d be living under a rock if you didn’t know about Star Wars,” says Varma—who has just landed in L.A. for the Obi-Wan Kenobi premiere—when we speak over Zoom. 

Varma eventually developed an appreciation for the Star Wars cinematic universe through her daughter: “What I love about those old movies,” says the actor, “is the sort banal within this really extraordinary setting. There’s so much room for humor and human fallibility. I just loved all these creatures [from the films], it felt to me like it wasn’t a European world.”

It’s interesting that Varma points out the inherently colorblind landscape of science fiction and fantasy offerings, given that these are often the only two genres in Hollywood that provide actors of color with a refuge from being typecast based on their ethnicity. I ask if this is something she enjoys, and Varma replies, “Oh, for sure. When you think about back in the day, Star Wars was very white—even though you had these creatures, these droids, which gave the sense of a multi-dimensional, diverse world—but there were no people of color. One thing about Obi is that it is so diverse, and that diversity was celebrated.”

Perhaps some of this celebration of diversity can be attributed to the fact that, for the first time in the franchise’s history, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a ship steered by a woman director—Deborah Chow. Varma, who made her film debut in Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra (1994) and who has worked with Gurinder Chadha on Bride and Prejudice (2004), is no stranger to working on a set with a woman in charge, but she welcomes the fact that women now have the opportunity to helm multi-million-dollar productions such as this one. “It’s amazing to work with a woman because they hear you in a different way,” says Varma, “The dialogue and the interchange is different—it’s a sisterhood. You’re not going to get the old school [male] directors who say to you, ‘All right, darling, you look lovely.’”