Ewan McGregor
The handsome actor and his new wave of fantastic films…
Fulfilling a role in real life as fabulous as those he plays on screen, Ewan McGregor is a world-famous actor and ex-bon vivant who has learnt when to stop in order to start again. His roles in Trainspotting and Moulin Rouge bought him respect, while the Star Wars trilogy made McGregor Hollywood-level famous. In his films he has appeared as various characters, including Christian, Andy, Renton and Obi-Wan. He will soon appear as Phillip, Bob and Gene.
From Fantastic Man n° 10 — 2009
Text by PAUL FLYNN
Photography by ALASDAIR McLELLAN
Styling by OLIVIER RIZZO
The day before we meet, Ewan McGregor had taken his wife and three daughters for a jolly day out at Wimbledon. The British tennis tournament was reaching its climactic stages under an unusually scorching London summer sky. Mistakenly, I assume his visit to the tennis happening to be in loosely patriotic support of his fellow Scot, Andy Murray, playing on centre-court. But McGregor is not an overtly Scottish Scottish-person, despite the fact that some of his Hollywood chums refer to him directly as “The Scotsman”. (He says he couldn’t, for instance, identify the Scottish Parliament building if he were shown a picture of it.)
After leaving Wimbledon he was chastised on the telephone by his mother, with whom he is close. She said that he really ought to have sent a message of support to Murray, something she had noted the most famous other Scottish actor than McGregor, the very overtly Scottish Scottish-person, Sean Connery, had done. McGregor winced at the very idea of this kind of over-familiarity with a stranger. “And I told her. Sean Connery also somehow managed to get that information to the media.” McGregor reminds me, quite purposefully, that at 38 years of age, he has now spent more of his life away from Scotland than he did in it. He moved to London at 17.
Last year the McGregor clan decamped from London to Los Angeles, to a house on the Brentwood/Santa Monica borders in which, he says, it is perfectly permissible for his children to skateboard around the kitchen. The move seems surprising only in that McGregor appears to be such an utterly un-LA person. At one juncture he mentions the fact that he would like to introduce his daughters to the Carry On films, the low-budget British comedies from the 60s and 70s that turned an endless succession of double entendre, screeching camp and hysterical farce into a kitsch British institution. To anybody outside of Britain, where they are loved, the Carry On films would make no sense. To an American, they would represent only absurdity.
McGregor has weathered well from his day under the Wimbledon sun, though his flesh is still uniquely Gaelic in tone and his accent remains largely untouched by his travels. His name is, of course, the most quintessentially Scottish name ever. He is back in London for a week and appears energised by the familiarity of it all, though we meet in the garden of a house in the exquisitely boring suburb of W7, a postcode I had previously not even registered as existing, by which he looks absolutely and correctly flummoxed. It seems perfectly appropriate for a man who was born into a bungalow.
The open-handed frankness of his character is immediately striking. He scratches his upper-arm tattoo, crosses and un-crosses his legs. The tattoo conveys the sartorial suggestion of a rock star and his attire follows. He is wearing an old T-shirt, slim jeans and Converse high-top sneakers, all in varying shades of washed-out black. His thick head of hair leans upwards. He has something of the fidget about him.
As an actor that has made the full film transition from local independents to global brands, McGregor has developed a particular speciality: male sentimentality. “If sentimentality is truthful,” he says, “then it is right. I think we are sentimental. It’s instinctive. There is a sentimentality to life. You can milk that thing, stretch it and abuse it, or you can recognise the truth of it. That’s what drama is about: making you feel.”
Before his star-turn in Moulin Rouge, this sentimentality was sewn into work that sat outside of mainstream, though plugged determinedly as being part of it. After Moulin Rouge, you can feel an admission in the actor that the Hollywood machine he railed furiously against as a young man was perhaps his destiny. The move to LA seems to confirm that. Over the coming twelve months he will prove to himself whether that was the case or not, starting with a fanfare procession of four huge cinema releases that began earlier this year with the Dan Brown adaptation Angels and Demons and will take in co-starring turns with a cast-list of heavyweight awards-magnets: Hilary Swank, Kevin Spacey, George Clooney, Roman Polanski, and Jeff Bridges, to name a few.
Ewan McGregor’s style of acting is a form which he calls “playing”—he has a regular habit of widening his eyes in awe and making you believe him, whatever the circumstance. If his contemporaries Daniel Craig and Jude Law are employed to bring a very British sort of upper-end glamour into a film, McGregor seems to have earned his commercial crust through warmth. Partly because of this, and partly because his breakout role in Trainspotting was such a generational phenomenon, admirers of his work do not think of him as being quite as remote as other film stars. Walking through Scottish cities, particularly, comes replete with problems for the actor: “Men will shout at me on the street ‘RENT BOOOOOY!!’ Continuously.” He doesn’t go back much.
McGregor is not a remote person. He is remarkably forthright for an actor negotiating the inner realms of Hollywood. His eyes are keen when he smiles and he can suddenly become all nose and teeth when he laughs. His natural disposition is set to affably upbeat. You can see why this might have led to mischief in the past. There is an air about him of a man who was always the last one propping up the bar and who is not afraid, either personally or professionally, to lose some control. They are appealing traits in a middle-aged man.
Two weeks before we meet in London, McGregor had been in Shanghai for the film festival, helping the Angels and Demons producers get it past the Chinese censors. It turned out that his first mentor, the British director Danny Boyle, who had cast him in Shallow Grave and then in the role which turned McGregor into a worldwide star as one of a socialised, functioning bunch of Edinburgh heroin addicts in Trainspotting, was the head of the festival’s grand jury.
After wiping the board at this year’s Oscars with Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle can reasonably be considered the hottest commercial yet intelligent film director in the world right now. For certain British men of a certain age and disposition, the names Ewan McGregor and Danny Boyle harmonise with the tunefulness of a classic song-writing partnership. McGregor was the Elton to Boyle’s Bernie Taupin, the Morrissey to his Marr. It is a male relationship that is worth believing in. When the two met in Shanghai, “for the first time in a very, very long time”, the actor went through a succession of conflicting emotional responses that he describes as analogous to that of happening upon an old lover: “It was kind of sad. I miss working with him. I miss him. I loved working with him. I think the relationship we had as actor and director was something that I have never really had since. I don’t mean to be rude to other directors I’ve worked with, because I really have worked with some fucking amazing people, but I had something very special with Danny that I can never replicate. We made our first film together. Then we made two more together after that. To me personally, at that time, being part of that filmmaking team was more important than anything else in the world. It was a bit like being Scottish. It was that important to my sense of identity. I felt it, strongly, being part of a new wave of British cinema. I was at the front of it because I was working with this one man. Danny. I suppose all things can’t go on forever. They don’t go on forever. But it’s a shame not to be working together because I think those things would still be there. I’m sure of that. There was something about being on set with him that was like being in love. I felt that. I loved that man. When I looked over and saw him on set I was always happy. You are basically talking about a break-up here.”
This has a silent sting for McGregor. If seeing Boyle again really was like coming across an old lover, then it must have been like finding out that they had gone on to marry someone far richer and better looking than himself. With Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle has not only trumped Trainspotting in terms of the international resonance of his own work, he has also very possibly trumped his first leading man’s work, too. Until the release of Slumdog Millionaire, there was little competition for Moulin Rouge as this decade’s defining love story. No longer. The quiet gauntlet that exists between the two has been thrown down again.
McGregor says he enjoyed Slumdog. “From start to finish it was complete. It has an extra thing for me, obviously, because I loved watching Danny’s touches in it. There were some that made me reflect on our films together. You know?” The question suggests that they were almost meant to. “There was an even bigger shit scene in Slumdog than there was in ours. I thought we’d capped that. I thought we’d done the worst that there could be. But no, there was more to come.” In one hyper-real sequence in Trainspotting, McGregor’s character, Renton, falls down a toilet pan. In Slumdog, Boyle engulfs his young Indian actor in a swimming river of faeces. “That’s very Danny.”
McGregor says that when he met Danny Boyle in Shanghai, they got on well. He had felt a particular pride for the director watching his film picking up eight Oscars because he knew in the smallest detail what they meant to the director, both of them being of such a similar class and experience and having so much pivotal shared history. The eagerness to his tone suggests that, from the actor’s point of view at least, their story has not yet ended.
In 2001, the same year that Ewan McGregor made Moulin Rouge, he gave up drinking. The moment of abstinence splits his film career directly in two. Post-sobriety he landed noticeably more commercial roles, culminating in the Star Wars sequence. “I just got fed up with it,” he says, of boozing. “I couldn’t handle it all, really. I was getting drunk a lot. A lot. And I became aware that I couldn’t keep all those balls in the air at one time. I was married and I had my first child – at that time it was just Clara – and I was just overindulging. I was carried away with it all. I always had been. I’d always drunk like that. I was always up for it.”
As a drinker, he was not a nice-glass-of-wine type; he was a nice-couple-of-bottles type. “I love the idea of being a one-drink, two-drink person. It’d be nice. Especially now, sitting here, in the middle of the summer. It’d be lovely to sit down with a nice glass of Pimm’s or a glass of beer. But I couldn’t do it and I can never remember doing it like that. I was an alcoholic drinker. I drank in a mad fashion. I was never satisfied. It was upsetting when I knew that the end of the night was coming. I couldn’t stand it. I was driven to carry on and driven to continue. So I would.”
Drink was beginning to interfere with his work. In 1997 he had set up the production company Natural Nylon with friends, the best known of which were Jude Law, Sadie Frost, Jonny Lee Miller and Sean Pertwee. The idea was to facilitate and lend an aspect to the British film industry that had a similarly hip cachet to the YBA’s and British art or Britpop and British music. “It didn’t happen. I made one film with Natural Nylon. Nora. I’m not into going in and making work happen. I’m not a businessman. Jude was always much better at taking a book and making it into a film, at working on scripts. He was much more hands-on. I was just, erm…” He pauses. “I was just always in the pub. The offices were right round the corner from a good pub. That’s all I did, really. My involvement with the whole company was going down and having a pint. A pint or eight. That’s what it was for me. We were quite good at launching it. We were quite good at launching anything, to be honest. But when it came down to the actual making of a film? That was problematic.”
From the outside and given the people involved in Natural Nylon, it very much looked like the company imploded in a blizzard of cocaine. “Aye. Yes, well it was the 90s. You know?” He laughs. “I was in Glasgow doing Young Adam when I left.” It was 2002 and McGregor was sober. “There had been problems with Nora, with crew not getting paid. There were a lot of stories in the press, again, about a film that they were making with Dougray Scott and Tim Roth, which I cannot even remember the name of, and they’d had to stop shooting again. It was always ‘Ewan McGregor and Jude Law’s production company’. I don’t want to badmouth anyone because we were and are a group of friends, but I just thought I cannot be involved in this. I don’t believe that people should work without pay. Actors are expected to do it all the time. People think of the career of acting as being somehow like having a hobby. The assumption is that you’re lucky to have a job. I’ve always resented that. It’s kind of why we end up doing fucking 20-hour days. I’ve always felt passionately that people should be paid for their work and paid properly. So I couldn’t quite reconcile the two things. And on top of that, it became really clear to me that I wasn’t doing anything in it. I wasn’t really a member of Natural Nylon in that I never really actually did anything. I acted in Nora and I went to board meetings, when they happened. And put my tuppence worth in. But I didn’t do anything else. I just went to the pub. And I did that to the best of my abilities.”
He is pleased with the decision he made to quit drinking. “It’s a way of life now. It doesn’t feel like that big of a deal after this amount of time. Smoking’s the same. Once you stop it’s not that big of a deal. I smoked like a Trojan. First thing in the morning? Always. But somehow when you stop you just don’t see it anymore.”
Last year was the busiest acting year of Ewan McGregor’s professional life. In terms of an aggressive Hollywood professional assault, he’d had three very quiet years before. “From 2004 to 2007 I did two big motorbike trips, London – New York and Scotland – Cape Town. Then I did two long stints in the theatre. In those three years I did a few movies, but I did less. It must have been a reaction to…something. I must’ve wanted to do different things. To try something different.” In 2004 he ended his relationship with the Star Wars franchise, after promoting the last of its three prequels, Revenge of the Sith. The magical aspect of acting had disappeared for McGregor, if not on screen, then somewhere deeper.
“The actors I like the best to work with are the ones who play. It doesn’t happen so much anymore. I have worked with actors who turn it on for their close-up. You see them doing it. And when it’s my close-up and they’re next to the camera, they’re not coming at you at all and they’re not entering into that sense of play. I do find it boring. I don’t understand the idea of just delivering lines. The scene has stopped being played. The sense is broken. I’m very sensitive to it. Overly sensitive to it, probably. Because I started working in Britain and I started with a very professional, quiet team that would understand that when the director shouts ‘action’ and the camera’s rolling, well, that time is sacred. People generally were still and quiet. That has got a bit looser. With the Star Wars films that I did, because there’s no tape anymore, it’s all green screen or blue screen and there’s only two cameras on a crane that are going in and out and there’s no set-up time, it just all felt a bit vague. Literally, the producer would walk around the set on his phone during takes. It would drive me nuts. I’m doing my job.”
A very male conflict in Ewan McGregor is palpable: your sense of ambition wants the big stuff, and your sense of personal pride wants to do the big stuff exactly on your own terms.
He gives some further evidence of the conundrum. He says that the anatomy of choosing a role can be interesting and he has learnt to spot things in scripts that are positioned for a particular calibre of film star. “I can recognise, particularly in a Hollywood script, those specific lines that you might call ‘the hero lines’.” He mentions Craig and Law. “I always find that with Daniel and Jude, though I haven’t seen as much of Daniel’s work as I have of Jude’s and I’m not saying this in terms of dismissing their work because with Jude, I think, you can very much empathise with him, too… But I always have problems with those lines. Those hero lines. Those movie-star lines. Because I can only make it feel real, somehow. I can’t really work any other way.” He says he doesn’t like looking at the monitor during playback after a take (“to me that is a little bit like looking in the mirror too much”) or seeing a film at the rushes stage. “If you sit and study the bare bones of a performance then you can be left with a feeling of ‘Oh. Is that it? That’s not very good.’ And it’s not very good because you are in the middle of a movie.”
He considers the suggestion that what he brings to a film is a human quality rather than a star turn. “Yeah… It’s interesting what you say. In some respects it’s nice. And you are probably right. But in another, everybody likes to categorise. And that’s the worry, isn’t it? Everyone puts everyone in pigeonholes. And I’ll be honest. I’d like to be able to play those starry roles as much as I like playing the empathetic ones.”
McGregor’s life in his 30s, in this decade, has been book-ended by two major, life-changing events. The first was his decision to give up drinking at the start of the decade and the second was moving to LA at the end of it. He says it wasn’t about work; the filming that takes place in LA is mostly for television and commercials, not films. “You just fancy a change sometimes.” While he was filming The Island in 2007, McGregor and his wife, Eve, had seen a friend of a friend’s 1920s Spanish house “and fallen for it.” They persuaded the occupiers to part with it.
“I’d railed against LA in my youth, but I came to this realisation that every time I went, I loved it. If you separate LA from the Hollywood system, it’s quite an interesting place. I like the look of it and the feel of it. I like driving bikes, you know, so it’s an easy place, warm enough, wide open. A lot of LA is just cracked cement and low, shitty buildings. I like that side of it. I keep my bikes lower down in Santa Monica and to get to them you go through Washington. And there’s a road where all the bike shops are, and between my house and there it’s just all wide, cracked cement. It’s baked and the paint has faded and there’s something weirdly beautiful about it. Then suddenly it’s all green again and people have gardens and it’s chichi and nice and you’ve stepped back over that line into what I think people think of as LA.”
“It might’ve just been to break the bond with London.” In 2009, on the eve of his 40s, Ewan McGregor doesn’t any longer need to be the British actor from Trainspotting, Moulin Rouge or Star Wars. He is the British actor starting over, on new turf, in a new time frame, with new possibilities of male sentiment stretching before him. “It settles me not knowing what’s going to happen next,” he says. His fidgeting is professional, too. And then later: “There is a sense in this business that is mostly perpetuated by agents that if you step out too long everything will move on without you. That might be true. But at the same time? So be it. Fuck it. Life is more important than work and the truth is that if you are a good actor and people think that you’re a good actor then they’ll want to hire you.”
It has been a reflective time for the actor. Two weeks after bumping into Danny Boyle at a film festival in China, he sat and watched Blur at Glastonbury on the BBC. “It takes me back, you know. Everything was happening at that time. Everything that was going on. I found the whole thing quite moving.”
Rather than book his family into a hotel he has holed them up in his office, two doors up from his London house, now rented. He keeps the office alive in London for the bureaucratic business of his career. “I spend most of my time in hotels. I’m with my wife and my kids. Even if it’s my office, at least it’s our stuff. It’s quite good fun. And it’s quite good for them to be tripping over each other, too. It’s quite good for them to realise that life isn’t just about skateboarding through the kitchen.”
Ewan McGregor says that he spent some time with his wife talking through the disparity between the life that their children have access to, compared to the opportunities they themselves had as kids. “They’ve had far more access to the world than I ever had. I’ve always made an effort with my wife to keep their childhood as normal as possible. This is something that’s ongoing with me as well in terms of coming to terms with success or access to things and what path you might tread in the world, which is something you do face a lot. As you get older you spend more time on it. Now I’m not going to hide away because of it. Which is something I’ve done in the past. I won’t deny myself something because of it. I seem to be built that way. I keep remembering details that happened a long time ago and I try not to worry about what’s going to happen next.”
Next McGregor will play a war-reporting journalist who uncovers a soldier with cryptic powers in Iraq, in The Men Who Stare at Goats. Then he will play Jim Carrey’s boyfriend in prison, in I Love You Phillip Morris. After this he will be Hilary Swank’s leading man in a tale of thwarted aviation, Amelia. The lover, the sodomist and the fighter. More men navigating their emotional and sometimes sentimental way through the world. It is no accident that Ewan McGregor lives in a family of four females and him.