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Ewan McGregor: ‘What if I'm not Scottish enough any more?’

lily — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 14:11:58 GMT

Ewan McGregor: ‘What if I'm not Scottish enough any more?’

Twenty years after Trainspotting made him a star – and the poster boy of 90s excess – could Ewan McGregor become Renton again?

ecently, I was in a cinema when the trailer for T2, the new Trainspotting film, was played. The whole room erupted into cheers. Perhaps your excitement is not as delirious. There are many who are dismissing the film before it’s even been screened. But I have a feeling that your anticipation levels are linked to how you spent your 1990s. Trainspotting, the 1996 original, remains the quintessential mid-90s movie. Like Oasis and Blur, like Kate Moss and love doves and Firestarter, it was of its time and captured that time’s cynical yet optimistic, hedonistic heart. Though the story was about heroin addicts, the feel of the film recalled different drugs: uppers, hallucinogens, ecstasy. There were real-unreal trippy sequences about losing pills in a toilet or going cold turkey; uplifting, rushy ones about clubbing and having sex. Plus fantastic music: Iggy Pop, Primal Scream, Leftfield. Trainspotting wasn’t shallow, but it didn’t dwell; it was always moving, like a long, clever pop video.

The characters were people you felt you already knew. There was Begbie, played by Robert Carlyle, the booze-fuelled, unpredictable psycho, a small-town Scottish version of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. Spud (Ewen Bremner): hapless, surreal, a lovable, smackhead loser. Sexy Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), out for whatever he could get, mostly women and drugs. And Renton, played by Ewan McGregor, the heroined-up antihero, who kept kicking drugs and then going back, and doing the same to his mates, until he finally robbed them all (except Spud) and ran away. What’s remarkable about Trainspotting is that even if you haven’t watched the film in years (I hadn’t), you’ll remember each character’s defining scene. Begbie’s was the freeze-frame where he chucked a beer glass over his shoulder into a packed pub. Spud’s was the whizzed-up job interview (“my pleasure in other people’s leisure”) and the unfortunate bedclothes-across-the-breakfast-table moment. Sick Boy, the slipperiest of a selection of born-slippy characters: snogging a girl with an E on his tongue.

And Renton? Renton had many. His rant about Scotland in the beautiful Highlands: “I don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers.” Laughing over the bonnet of a car that nearly knocks him down. Emerging from The Worst Toilet In Scotland, precious pills in his hands: “Ya dancers!” And, of course, his voiceover: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career…”

Trainspotting was one of the highest-grossing British films of the decade. It made everyone involved a star, but McGregor became the biggest. He and director Danny Boyle had already made one film together, 1995’s Shallow Grave, and they made one more afterwards, A Life Less Ordinary. But when Boyle and his team cast Leonardo DiCaprio for their next film, The Beach in 2000, McGregor was very hurt. He never worked with Boyle again. Instead, he went mega, playing the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, singing with Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge and securing his reputation as a Hollywood star.
Twenty years on, McGregor lives in LA, where I meet him at the photographer’s studio. He arrives and leaves on his motorbike, with minimal fuss. (A waiting fan, dressed in a Star Wars costume, is dismissed before McGregor spots him.) Though he is 45, he looks young and retains an up-for-it, let’s-enjoy-life, un-adult charm. His grin eats shit. Many stars bring an attitude. McGregor brings the fun.

I’ve not seen the new film, and when we meet McGregor has been shown only a rough cut. But the themes appear to be nostalgia and friendship. In the trailer, there are call backs to the original film: two skinny lads running, like Spud and Renton in the original; Underworld’s music pumping beneath; and, once more, Renton’s sudden laugh in the face of a car. And, of course, not only does the new film reunite the characters, it reassembles the real-life protagonists: the same actors, director, producer, writer. It’s like a band reunion after years of sniping, with all the wariness and sentimentality that such an occasion can bring.

“I felt like Renton, going back,” McGregor says. “I had these feelings like, ‘Shit! I haven’t lived in Scotland since I was 17!’ I moved to London to go to drama school, and I go home every year, because my parents are there, and my brother and his family, and I love it, but I haven’t lived there, and… Of all the characters I’ve played who’ve been Scots, Renton is the most Scottish of them all. And I suddenly thought, ‘Fuck! What if I can’t do it? What if I’m not Scottish enough any more?’”

In the film, Renton returns to Leith, Edinburgh, after living in Amsterdam for years. He’s been hiding from his past and his old friends for two decades, and now he has to face them. In this and other ways, it parallels real life. Before the film, McGregor hadn’t seen Robert Carlyle, “not since the premiere for Trainspotting, and I don’t remember the premiere for Trainspotting, so I don’t know if I saw him there or not”. He has worked with Bremner a few times (Black Hawk Down, Jack The Giant Slayer), and he had a production company in the early 2000s in which Jonny Lee Miller was also involved. But Boyle, his producer Andrew Macdonald and writer John Hodge, McGregor avoided for years. “How many? Ten, maybe more? A long while.”

Though he denied it publicly, he was too upset to make contact. At one point, there was an encounter in the Union club in London’s Soho. McGregor was having lunch with a young director. They happened to be sitting at the same table where Boyle told McGregor he wasn’t needed for The Beach.

“And Danny walks in,” he says. “And I went white. I got up and went over and he said, ‘Oh God, you’re not sitting at that table, are you?’ It was exactly like bumping into an ex. Because it was really a bit like that, a love affair. He’d been my first director, and my favourite director and I… I was in love with him, like, I really liked him.”

Things remained awkward, even though they kept bumping into each other. Once, in 2009, they were both on a long-haul flight back from the Shanghai film festival. There were four people in the first-class cabin: McGregor, his wife, Eve, Stephen Daldry and Boyle. “And Daldry put his light off and went to sleep, then Eve put her light off and went to sleep, and I was just sitting, me, and there’s Danny on the other side of the aisle with his light on. And I was thinking, ‘This could be the moment where we talk about it and put it to bed.’ Hours went by, and I was like, ‘Just go and effing talk to him, say something.’ But I couldn’t get out of my seat.”

Soon after Shanghai, McGregor was asked to present Boyle with a Bafta for Slumdog Millionaire. He ignored the script he was given – “Some garbage: these jokey things you’re meant to say” – and instead spoke from the heart. “About how much I’d loved working with him, and how happy I was always to look over and see him on the set, and how I trusted him and how he got me to do my best work. And then I said, ‘After I stopped working with him, he went on to make…’ and I listed all his movies. I’d learned them in chronological order.”

Since then, things have been OK, and a few years on, having resisted for ages, McGregor felt open to making T2 Trainspotting. His reluctance also stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t liked Porno, Welsh’s next book, as much as Trainspotting. “I wasn’t touched by it in the same way, and I didn’t want anything to tarnish the film. No one wants to make a shite sequel. Trainspotting was the Oasis of the film world, something quite amazing.”
I interviewed McGregor a couple of times in the 1990s, and what struck me then was how unstarry he was – meaning, interested in other people, no matter their status, wanting to make everyone happy – and also how deeply confident. Confident to the point of swashbuckling. Such self-assurance is often absent in actors, who require other people’s words to feel in control.

“I have my unconfident moments on my own, I guess,” he says now. “Leading up to a job, there are great moments of, ‘Oh shit! What have I done, I’m not going to be able to do it!’, a period of nervousness and fear. But of all the things in my life, I’ve always found that my work, I don’t question it. I’ve always wanted to do this, I’ve made it my life’s focus to be an actor and to try to be good at it and enjoy it, and I have a very instinctive way of doing that. I’m not tortured. I’ve never been one for a great deal of preparation. I don’t sit in a library or do a lot of intellectual investigative work. I’m much better in the moment, with the other actors on the set and the cameras rolling – that’s where I love it, and I trust that. So… I am quite confident about it.”

McGregor has always credited his uncle, the actor Denis Lawson, for stirring the idea of performing in him. McGregor grew up in Crieff, a small, conservative town near Perth, where his parents worked as teachers. Lawson would sweep through, in a swishy afghan coat and no shoes, and the young Ewan wanted some of that. So he dropped out of school after his O-grades, studied drama at Kirkcaldy College of Technology, and then, at 18, moved to London to go to Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He lived in the YMCA at the Barbican (now shut), next door to two Scouse brickies. He’d hear them with different girls at the weekend, which was grim enough, but then, “I heard somebody’s head banging against the wall, and she was going, ‘Stop it!’ And he shouts, ‘Shut up!’ So I banged on the door and then I had to bolt my room because there was a ruckus and they were hammering on my door.”

He moved to Snaresbrook, way out on the Central line (“There were cows in the high street. I don’t think I imagined that”), and from there to Leyton, to an illegally rented council flat. One night, he was on the balcony and someone drove down the street really fast and smashed into a wall. Two people scrambled out of the wreckage, looked at each other over the car roof and burst out laughing. “Like Trainspotting, before Trainspotting.”

And then, before he’d even finished his drama course, he got a job: the starring role in Dennis Potter’s Lipstick On Your Collar. His uncle Denis sat him down and explained everything: your eyeline relative to the camera, hitting your spot, what each person does and why. After that, he borrowed Denis’s car, put all his stuff in it and moved into a one-bed flat in Primrose Hill. “That’s when all the shenanigans started.”

The shenanigans. Ah, yes. When you saw McGregor out during the 90s, he was always in full effect: roister-doistering, pulling everyone into his orbit, a full-on, one-man party. “I loved it. I mean, to the point where I had to stop it, drinking and everything, because I liked it too much. I liked it to the point where I didn’t ever want it to end, so I would find myself in places at seven in the morning, not knowing anybody, just because I had this hunger. An excitement about going out. A stupid teenager excitement, but in the body of an early 20s man.”
He gave up drink in 2000, after his second Star Wars film. He’d tried to cut down before, but it hadn’t worked, and during Moulin Rouge, which was filmed in Australia, “that was the darkest time, really. The film was one of the biggest and most amazing things I’ve ever been involved in, but I was out of control. I couldn’t keep all the balls in the air, if you like. Being a dad, being a husband, being an actor and being a drinker just didn’t fit together, and the only one I was prepared to lose was that one. So I just kicked it.”

You wonder, if he’d kicked the booze earlier, whether he would have set up his production company, Natural Nylon. McGregor started it in 1997 with his actor mates Jonny Lee Miller, Jude Law, Sadie Frost and Sean Pertwee, plus two producers, Damon Bryant and Bradley Adams. They made one good film, Nora, which had McGregor playing James Joyce to Susan Lynch’s Nora Barnacle, but not many more. McGregor left in 2002, because, he says, “no one was getting paid. Maybe it felt to the others like a bit of a Renton-esque move on my part,” he says, “to leave like that. I just fucked off and the company slowly fell apart.”

Anyhow, he was, by then, a Star Wars employee. Not an easy job. McGregor found “green screen” acting hard – he had to imagine the whole of space! By the second movie, he had to imagine Yoda and R2D2 as well – and he mentioned this in interviews. These days, it is common for the stars of a major film to sign agreements that they won’t say anything negative about the project; I’d heard such legalities came about because of McGregor’s early Star Wars comments. But he says he doesn’t think so. He stopped being negative of his own accord, once he realised how important the whole shebang was to young fans. “You don’t want to be telling kids that Star Wars isn’t fun.”

Though he likes the vast landscape of big movies (and the money), indies are his natural habitat. Two years ago, he appeared in a film called Last Days In The Desert, “a beautiful movie”, and, for him, part of the beauty was shooting it in an intense five weeks, with a 12-person crew, in the desert south-east of LA. With smaller films, he feels he can contribute more. Also, I think, he liked the wildness. There’s a slight wanderlust in McGregor and he’s made a few travel-style documentaries, including two long motorcycle trips with his friend Charley Boorman. They were going to do them on their own, but got a TV company involved, he says, “because then someone else could get all the visas, do all the paperwork”. (This is very McGregor: looking for the most fun way around a problem.) “Looking back,” he says, “it was a desire to step off the treadmill. I was making a lot of movies, probably slightly bigger ones than I make now, and they can feel more soulless. They’re slower, and they need more promotion, and ultimately, I suppose, they’re not really my bag. So the first trip was the antidote to that.”
They sneaked the idea of a long trip past their wives. They were all having a meal, and he and Boorman started looking at a map quietly in the corner. And then, “later that night, because they’d had a few glasses of wine, I went, ‘I was thinking about doing this with Charley, what do you think?’ and they were like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ So we sort of slipped it in.”

Actually, when I watched those docs, I thought of McGregor’s wife, at home with their daughters. Eve Mavrakis appeared at the end of the series, to meet him: a wry, beautiful French woman, clearly her own person. They met on Kavanagh QC (she is a film production designer), married in 1995; and, after living in London for many years, moved to LA in 2008. They’d bought a “1920s Spanish-Californian house” there in 2005, when McGregor was feeling flush after Michael Bay’s The Island. For a while, they rented it out, “and then something happened with my love affair with London”, McGregor says. “I’ve been a huge Londonphile over the years – I think it’s the best city in the world – and then something cracked. When you’re recognised in Britain, there can be a certain amount of, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ and I don’t think I’m anyone. That had something to do with it. I realised that I spent a lot of time with my head down, walking quickly with the earphones on.”

They were only going to stay two years, but now they’re well installed, with their eldest, Clara, going to university in New York, and their other three daughters at school in LA. He loves it, for the motorbiking and because “all the schools are like Grease”. He’s even made the move into directing, stepping up to the plate last year for American Pastoral, an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel, after Phillip Noyce dropped out.

McGregor worked hard, even at the promotion, which he dislikes – “A major depression comes in afterwards, because you’ve given away all this stuff” – but the reviews were not great, with most critics feeling the bigger ideas of the book were reduced in favour of a conventional portrayal of a midlife meltdown. He loved directing, and is still “slightly reeling” that the film didn’t do as well as he’d hoped. (He doesn’t usually read his press, but for this he felt he had to.) He’d like to direct something more lo-fi, but, “I don’t know… As an actor, in LA it’s pretty brutal. You’re only as good as your last success, do you know what I mean?”
So let’s concentrate on T2 Trainspotting, which, fingers crossed, will be a success. In terms of relationships, it already is, not only because of the Boyle affair, but because McGregor was able properly to reconnect with Miller. Always the quietest of the Natural Nylon crew, Miller is now a father and, it appears, a martial arts master. He is massively fit, regularly running 50- and 100-mile marathons. (When they were filming in Edinburgh, McGregor would run around Arthur’s Seat. Miller would run up it.) “It was really lovely to be back with Jonny,” McGregor says. And it was made easier, somehow, by the film. “When Renton is back with Sick Boy,” McGregor says, “there’s something complete about them again. There’s shots of me and Jonny watching telly on the sofa… It all came back. And there’s a moment where I have to come up through rafters and it became like coming out of the toilet in the first film. But only inside me. It wasn’t written that way. Danny didn’t say, ‘Do it like that,’ it just happened. It was like a direct connection to something I did 20 years ago. That happened all the time, because Renton is me, and I am him.”

After our interview, I email Welsh to ask him about T2 Trainspotting. He replies that the original film was about close friendships and how they help you find your identity, but “ultimately crush your individuality, to the point where you have to break free”. T2 Trainspotting is the consequence. It’s about how that individuality destroys people and community, “making us all narcissistic to the point of being mentally ill, and [then] makes us seek out those old relationships and reinvest in them”. It’s a film that “looks back to lost youth and the wasted optimism of the 90s.” And then wonders: oh God – what happened?

Soon after he finished T2 Trainspotting, McGregor tells me he watched the Oasis documentary Supersonic. “And it really slayed me. I can’t describe it, I was so upset afterwards. Because I was such a huge Oasis fan. Like, ridiculous, a schoolboy fanaticism, when I was a dad already, you know? Embarrassing. And watching that film, I really wanted to go back. Just being out there and having a great time, and being a part of what the 90s has become in my mind. I remember seeing Radiohead in Cork in a field, just after Trainspotting had come out, and feeling like part of it all… Anyway, I loved that documentary. I mean, I loved it and I hated it. Because it made me so sad and it made me so happy.”

Nostalgia can do that, I say.

“Yes,” he says. “That time has gone, it can never happen again – but it changed our whole existence.”

• T2 Trainspotting is released on 27 January.

Ewan McGregor on Directing, ‘T2’ and a Possible Obi-Wan Repr

lily — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 10:02:07 GMT

Ewan McGregor on Directing, ‘T2’ and a Possible Obi-Wan Reprisal
The Scottish actor stopped by Hearst for a Masterclass Q&A
By Madeleine Streets • 10/21/16

Ewan McGregor and Esquire’s Jay Fielden. Courtesy Hearst

“Junkie, Jedi, Jesus” is how Ewan McGregor was introduced to Wednesday’s crowd by Jay Fielden, editor in chief of Esquire. But a new title he goes by is ‘director’. Despite being famous for a filmography that ranges from Star Wars to Moulin Rouge to Trainspotting, the Scottish actor has tried to get behind the camera twice, with no success. Then, his moment came. Having been cast as the male lead in the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, McGregor was devastated to hear that the director had dropped out only months before shooting was due to start.

“When I didn’t think it was going to happen, I realized maybe this was the story I’d been waiting for, for 20 years,” he explained. He suggested he take over the position of director and the producers agreed.

The 45-year-old Scottish actor, philanthropist, motorcyclist and father of four was speaking as part of the Hearst Masterclass Q&A series. With his directorial debut now premiering, the talk was a great opportunity to open up about American Pastoral – and for McGregor to show off his good humor. When the projector struggled to play the trailer and displayed only a black screen, he quipped: “We had a bit more light on it when we shot it…”

The uncertain start mirrored McGregor’s own nerves before shooting started. Although he was given nine months to prep and 12 weeks on site in Pittsburgh before the actors arrived, he was uneasy about beginning the project. “I’ve seen the fear in first-time directors’ eyes, I’ve seen people who lose it in a movie because the responsibility is large,” he told the crowd. He also spoke of not wanting to fail in front of his cast, which included Jennifer Connolly and Dakota Fanning.

Fortunately, these worries eased once filming started and he was able to focus on his vision. “It was important to me that the period of the film didn’t overwhelm our ability to connect with the characters,” he said of the 1960s setting. There was also the importance of getting the special effects correct, as the characters age substantially through the film. For McGregor, there was also a personal element at play; his ‘old age’ make-up was based on photographs of his father, taken specially for the project.

“There’s something beautiful about the pictures, because he’s doing them for me and you can tell he’s taking it seriously,” McGregor recalled. The photos were used to suggest what the actor might look like in his late 70s and the results, created by special effects make-up artist Michael Marino (Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream), were uncanny. Speaking of the end of the movie, McGregor got quite emotional. “It’s extra moving for me because I look like my father.”

The Scot takes after his dad in more than just looks; as a child he was a side-drummer in the pipe band, a role that both his father and uncle played before him. “I won the drumming cup that my father presented to the school,” he bragged. “I got the McGregor Drumming Cup! People thought it was rigged, but it wasn’t!” He’s since moved onto the bagpipes, perhaps the most Scottish hobby possible, after talking to a driver, who was also a bagpiper, on set for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. McGregor spent most of the five months he was filming Jack the Giant Slayer (which he described as ‘not my best work’ and ‘basically just waiting to go on set’) learning how to play the pipes in his trailer. His skills are now rusty, as his wife and daughters hate the sound of pipes, as does their dog. “Something about the harmonics kicks off his wolf instincts,” laughed McGregor.

Perhaps sticking to his strengths, another upcoming project that McGregor was excited to talk about is T2, the long-awaited sequel to Trainspotting, which is set to drop 20 years after the original. The film is something of a reunion for McGregor and director Danny Boyle, who worked together on three films before they fell out over the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach instead of McGregor. “It was handled not very kindly to me and I was very upset because I thought that I was their guy,” he admitted. Both men continued to work in a substantial list of films, but never together. Eventually they mended fences when McGregor presented Boyle with a BAFTA award in 2009 and the director responded by thanking McGregor, “whose graciousness I don’t deserve.”

Ewan McGregor and Esquire’s Jay Fielden. Courtesy Hearst

This has set the pair up to join together for T2, which they finished filming this summer and is set to release next year. Based on the Trainspotting sequel, Porno, McGregor describes the script as ‘a blinder’ but confessed to worrying about how it would feel to play Renton again after 20 years away from the character. Luckily, all it took was the wardrobe: “When I got there and I put on the Adidas, I was all good.”

There’s simply no rest for McGregor. When he isn’t directing or acting (or charming an audience at a masterclass), he gets involved with the real issues, which includes getting political on Twitter. His angry message to Boris Johnson following Britain’s ‘Brexit’ vote in the summer was retweeted nearly 65,000 times and McGregor was quick to echo the sentiment during the Q&A. But he also spoke warmly of his role as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, which most recently involved a visit to their displacement camps in Northern Iraq. His most famous travels were his motorcycle journeys across the world with Charley Boorman, immortalized in the documentaries Long Way Round and Long Way Down, which showed them visiting UNICEF sites in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

And if there’s time, he’s even considering a potential reprisal of his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. In news sure to delight Star Wars fans across the world, McGregor said that he would return to the part if asked to do so. Still, that isn’t to say he enjoyed the experience itself so much. “No, they weren’t much fun to make!” he laughed. He attributed this to the amount of green-screen work involved. “Often I had storylines that took me off on my own and I’d be acting with tennis balls on sticks and that was really weird.” Nevertheless, the character and franchise holds a special place in his heart. “I’m still so glad I did them, it’s an important part of my filmography and I’m proud to be part of that legend that is Star Wars. I’ll always be that.”

The overriding feeling that McGregor gives off is someone juggling a lot of passions but who wouldn’t want it any other way. Ideas that he bounced around included doing another motorbike documentary, this time through South America, and becoming an American citizen so that he could vote in the next election. For now though, he seems quite pleased to be in this dual role of actor and director and doesn’t plan to swap one for the other. When asked which category he’d prefer to win an Oscar in, he was resolute.

“To be recognized for your work as an actor wouldn’t be any less of an achievement to me than being recognized as a director… I think I would be very happy with both,” he grinned. “So I’d like both please! At the same time!”

Ewan McGregor Reflects on His Time Working on the 'Star Wars

lily — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 18:19:27 GMT

Ewan McGregor Reflects on His Time Working on the 'Star Wars' Prequels

By: Dominic Jones
http://www.starwarsunderworld.com/2016....me.html
Ewan McGregor has been promoting the release of his directorial debut, American Pastoral, and in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter where he reflected on his time working on the Star Wars prequels. He spoke about reading the script for The Phantom Menace for the first time, working with Yoda, and the amount of blue screen that was used in the prequels. You can watch Ewan discuss the prequels below,
When he was asked to reflect on his first meeting with George Lucas, McGregor said,
I don’t remember. I remember my first, one I had the job, I remember I had to go to studios in Watford, the north of London where they shot all the Harry Potter movies. And it’s now like an attraction, I think (...) You can go there and see Harry Potter World but when we worked there, it was an old-factory. It wasn’t really a film studio yet. And they took over because it’s an enormous thing, Star Wars. So they took over. I remember going there meeting George and being allowed to read the script. So I had to read it in the producer’s office like literally being almost locked in with the script, so that it doesn’t get leaked and then being shown around the sets with George and walking around and I remember we looked. There was a great big submarine thing that I end up in with Liam and Jar Jar Binks. And then I remember looking at these props, this art department guys sort of carving this huge polystyrene thing into the submarine and there was a cockpit. And I looked at it and I went will be go under? He looked at me and went, “What?” I said will we go underwater with it. And he looked at me like I was insane. [LAUGHTER]He said, “None of that it’s real, you know.” And I went oh, yeah.

On the amount of blue screen used in the prequels, McGregor said,
Well, it was more and more blue screen as we went along. The first one I remember more sets. And there was like an environment to work in and as we got into episode two and three, they moved the shoot to Australia and we were shooting in Australia in the studio there in Sydney. By that point, it became more and more blue screen and green screen. I thought it was a shame. You know, in the first one I worked with Yoda like it was on set. Frank Oz I think was operating him with his team of people. And I scenes with Yoda, it was amazing. It was like working with a star that you have known all your life, you know. [LAUGHTER]I worked with Yoda today and it was easy to work with him. He was like a good actor. [LAUGHTER]And when he said cut, you know, you’d be really in the moment with Yoda and then they would go cut and all the puppeteers would stop. So Yoda would be like this, suddenly die. And you’d always go are you OK? Are you OK? [LAUGHTER]And then by episode two and three, he was, and R2D2 was the same way. It was computer generated. It was a shame not to be sort of working with the real thing.

McGregor also did a Twitter Q&A to promote American Pastoral, where he was asked who he would want to play his Jedi padawan should he make another Star Wars film (or two, or three),

.@nerdist #AskEwan pic.twitter.com/9PfcuPALOj
— Ewan McGregor (@mcgregor_ewan) 21 октября 2016 г.

Ewan McGregor reflects on the superstar path not taken

lily — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 18:16:44 GMT

As he makes his directorial debut, Ewan McGregor reflects on the superstar path not taken

фото Kirk McKoy

by Josh Rottenberg
источник

Philip Roth’s sweeping 1997 novel “American Pastoral” is about many things: the breaking apart of a family, the political schisms of the ’60s and ’70s, the meaning and mutability of Jewish identity. But at its heart, the book is about how we routinely fail to understand one another on a fundamental human level.

“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway,” Roth writes in one of the book’s most famous passages. “It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.”

On Friday, an adaptation of Roth’s novel hits theaters, with Scottish actor Ewan McGregor starring and making his directorial debut. And if that seems surprising — if a foray into Rothian literary territory doesn’t totally square with our image of an actor who dove into a toilet as a heroin-addicted slacker in 1996’s “Trainspotting,” sang and danced in the lavish 2001 musical “Moulin Rouge” and wielded a lightsaber in the “Star Wars” prequels — it may be because we’ve gotten McGregor wrong all this time.

In “American Pastoral,” McGregor plays Seymour “Swede” Levov, a successful businessman and former star high school athlete whose world is upended when his teenage daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning) becomes politically radicalized amid the turmoil of the 1960s. After Merry sets off a bomb to protest the Vietnam War and goes into hiding, Levov and his wife, Dawn (Jennifer Connelly), find their once-happy, upper-middle-class lives tragically unraveling.

On paper, McGregor, 45, seems a rather unlikely candidate to take on Roth’s story. He had never directed a feature before (two previous projects he had hoped to helm over the years both fell through), let alone an adaptation of a celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with an epic historical sweep. Nor, though he has lived in Los Angeles for roughly a decade with his wife and four daughters, is he American — and “American Pastoral,” as the title suggests, is very much about America.

But over breakfast on a recent morning in Beverly Hills, McGregor — radiating the infectious positivity and restless curiosity that helped win him the job of directing the film — shrugged off the idea that the project was outside of his wheelhouse.

“I’m asked about it all the time, but I really don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve spent my working life imagining characters who, like, 80% of them are not Scottish. It’s sort of my job as a creative person to learn. Ultimately I was telling the story of a dad and a husband and a wife and a daughter, and I know an awful lot about that. I think those topics are quite universal.”

McGregor was initially attached simply to star in “American Pastoral.” But when director Phillip Noyce (“Clear and Present Danger”) departed the project months before shooting was set to begin, McGregor’s wife, production designer Eve Mavrakis, encouraged him to throw his hat in the ring to direct it himself.

“I had wanted to direct for 20 years,” said McGregor, whose only previous directing credit is a short film that was included in a 1999 collection of stories about London Underground passengers called “Tube Tales.” “I’ve always been a very busy actor and I like it that way, but I always felt like a filmmaker. I recently saw a clip of me on [a British talk show] just after ‘Trainspotting’ and he asked me, ‘Where will you be in 20 years time?’ I said, ‘I’ll be directing and acting.’ I was right!”

If McGregor felt daunted by taking on such a monumental novel, he didn’t show it on the set. “I don’t think Ewan was approaching it from a place of fear and trepidation,” Connelly said. “He was just coming at it with great enthusiasm and admiration for the novel and excitement about telling that story.”

Throughout the process, McGregor never met or spoke with Roth, whose books have long been considered difficult to translate to the screen. (An adaptation of his 2008 novel “Indignation” released earlier this year, directed by James Schamus, earned strong reviews.) But, after seeing a screening of “American Pastoral,” the author relayed positive feedback through his representative. “I felt hugely relieved,” said McGregor. “If that hadn’t been the case, I would have felt like I’d failed in some way.”

It’s been 20 years since McGregor first burst to international fame, showcasing his irrepressible charisma and leading-man looks in the cult hits “Shallow Grave” and “Trainspotting,” both directed by Danny Boyle. In 1997, Empire magazine placed him at No. 36 on its list of the top 100 movie stars of all time, despite the fact that at that point, he had only made a handful of movies.
I’ve always been a very busy actor and I like it that way, but I always felt like a filmmaker. — Ewan McGregor

But movie stardom for its own sake was never a part of McGregor’s calculus. “I didn’t want to come to Hollywood for ages,” he said. “I felt like I was involved in something British that changed things to an extent with ‘Shallow Grave’ and then ‘Trainspotting,’ and I felt like it defined me a bit as an actor. Even when [Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge and I] came as a filmmaking team and we did ‘A Life Less Ordinary,’ which was an American romantic comedy, I felt like it was us almost trying to beat the Americans at their own game.”

In 1997, McGregor signed on to play a younger version of Alec Guinness’ Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas’ highly anticipated “Star Wars” prequels, 1999’s “The Phantom Menace,” 2002’s “Attack of the Clones” and 2005’s “Revenge of the Sith” — an opportunity that most actors would have leapt at but one he settled on only after much deliberation.

“It didn’t really feel right to me in a way,” he said. “I was terribly arrogant about my work and felt absolutely assured of what I was about. At the time I just felt, ‘That’s not me.’ I thought about it long and hard and spoke to lots of people.

“The closer I got to the part, the more I wanted to do it – and I’ll always be glad I did,” he continued. “But I didn’t indulge in the afterglow of it... It’s funny – I just think of them as being three films I did among all the others. It didn’t become anything else to me.”

Indeed, whereas some actors might have used such a massive franchise as a jumping-off point for more glittery blockbusters, McGregor continued to chart an unpredictable course, zigzagging between lead roles and supporting parts, theater work and film, bigger movies like “Moulin Rouge” and the sci-fi film “The Island” and smaller ones like the romantic dramedy “Beginners” and the wrenching tsunami drama “The Impossible.”

At perhaps his moment of peak fame, as the “Star Wars” prequels were coming to a conclusion, McGregor literally dropped off the Hollywood radar, embarking on a 19,000-mile, 115-day global motorcycle trek with his friend Charley Boorman, the son of “Deliverance” director John Boorman, a journey chronicled in the British documentary series “Long Way Round.”

“Ewan is a great actor who is not content with just being a movie star,” said Tom Rosenberg, who produced “American Pastoral” along with Gary Lucchesi. “He wants to be challenged, he has a great appetite for difficult roles and he’s not precious about what he does.”

The fact is, McGregor says he wouldn’t even know how to chart a career in a more conventional fashion if he wanted to. “I’m not very clever with it,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t really think that way. I made this brilliant film last year called ‘Last Days in the Desert,’ where I play Jesus and the Devil. None of my agents were that enthusiastic about me doing it because it’s the kind of film that I guess no one is really going to go see. But it was an amazing experience and I just wanted to do it so badly. I’m not thinking beyond, ‘I’ve got to play this part.’ ”

That said, high-profile movies still regularly come McGregor’s way. He recently wrapped work on a live-action reworking of Disney’s animated “Beauty and the Beast,” playing Lumiere, and also will reprise his role as Mark Renton in an upcoming sequel to “Trainspotting.” And while he has avoided the “Star Wars” convention circuit over the years, he says he’d be up for another crack at playing Kenobi in the now-revived franchise should the chance ever arise.

“I’ve always thought there would be a good film between the last one that I made and Alec Guinness,” he said. “There’s got to be some story about Obi-Wan in the desert when he’s lost his way.” He laughed wryly. “There’s probably even a trilogy — who knows? It could be cool. But there’s nothing on the table at the moment.”

Having been deeply immersed in “American Pastoral” for the past few years, while also acting in numerous other projects, the ever-busy McGregor is now preparing to start work on another deep dive into American life, albeit a more darkly comic one, in the third season of FX’s acclaimed crime series “Fargo.”

“I play two parts — they’re brothers but they’re not twins,” he said. “I was given the directive I’ve been waiting for for 24 years, which was to get fat, so I’ve been eating like a pig. And I have to learn the [Minnesota] accent, which is difficult.

“I’ll get there, but at the moment it’s a bit scary,” he added after a pause, sounding less scared than excited at the prospect. He smiled. “Oooh, yaah.”

Ewan McGregor Made It to 45 in One Piece

lily — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 20:22:01 GMT

КАК ТОЛЬКО БУДЕТ ВРЕМЯ ПЕРЕВЕДУ)

Ewan McGregor Made It to 45 in One Piece

Twenty years after Trainspotting, the actor and first-time director has never left the spotlight—or the saddle.

By Hannah Elliott | September 7, 2016
for Bloomberg Pursuits

Ewan McGregor hasn’t ridden a motorcycle in weeks. Not because he can’t get to one: The Scottish actor owns dozens—including a 1956 Sunbeam S7, an Indian Larry chopper, and “one of the most beautiful bikes ever built,” he says, a 1972 Moto Guzzi V7 Sport. He’s stashed those and others in garages around the Highlands and at his home in Los Angeles. “You’re getting away with something riding a motorbike,” he says over a cup of black coffee at the City Cafe, an American-style diner in Edinburgh. He’s in town shooting the sequel to Trainspotting, the darkly comic tale of clever, handsome heroin addicts that launched his career in 1996. But he hasn’t been on a bike since filming started. Miramax’s production insurance won’t allow it.
In the past, McGregor would have ignored that part of the agreement. “They stipulate that you’re not meant to parachute, scuba dive, ski, snowboard, all of these things. One of them says that you won’t race motorcycles—I always used to tick that box,” he says with a conspiratorial grin. “I used to just ride because I didn’t care and thought, ‘Whatever.’ But the truth of the matter is that if you fell off and broke your arm or leg or worse, and the production had to shut down for five months while you recuperated, then you’d be split f---ing open for that. Plus, with age and responsibility and children ...” McGregor shrugs.
The word “responsibility” may sound odd coming from an actor who’s spent much of his career—almost 60 films in the last two decades—playing likable rogues and loners who get in over their heads. But it’s his newest adventure behind the camera that’s inspired newfound respect for that pesky “no riding” clause.
In October, McGregor will release his directorial debut, American Pastoral. Based on the 1997 novel by Philip Roth, the movie follows Seymour “Swede” Levov, played by McGregor, whose charmed life unravels after his daughter (Dakota Fanning, doing her best Patty Hearst) plants a bomb in a post office to protest the Vietnam War.
“As a director, it’s like putting on a really heavy backpack,” says McGregor. “I had to find all the locations. I made the creative decisions that would make the film the way I wanted it to be. As an actor, you’re protected entirely from that side of the business. It’s only very recently that I’ve not been living with the responsibility of this movie.”
Now 45, McGregor is balancing the obligations of life and work with the wilder instincts of his younger years, when he was playing the lovesick writer in Moulin Rouge! and a young Obi-Wan Kenobi. After American Pastoral, there’s the sequel to Trainspotting due in February, and next spring, he’s taking over American television, starring in the upcoming season of FX’s Fargo, the Emmy-winning show inspired by the Coen brothers’ 1996 film.
He’s given up drinking and smoking, too, just black coffee, thanks, and has taken up long-distance running with his usual fountain-of-youth enthusiasm. “It’s nice to have something that you enjoy doing that’s good for your body and that you can do till you’re old,” he says.
But bring up motorcycles, and he still sounds like the teenager who walked into a London Ducati dealership and spied a dusty black Moto Guzzi that he thought was a Le Mans but turned out to be a 1978 T3 customized with a Le Mans tank and seat. Didn’t matter. “It was beautiful. I’ve never gotten over motorbikes since the first time I rode one—I’ve never gotten over that I’m allowed to do it, like, I’ve got a license to do it,” he says. “The state lets me ride!”
And unlike blue chip collectors who hire professionals to keep their bikes running, McGregor works on all of his motorcycles himself. “When I grow up, I’ll have somebody take care of them for me,” he says. “That’ll be nice.”
Today is a rare day off; McGregor, wearing a tweed longshoreman’s cap and blue jeans rolled at the cuff, arrived carrying shopping bags. It’s a late Monday afternoon, and the cafe is almost empty. The highly trafficked streets that flank the restaurant are filled with summertime revelers, but the cobblestone road out front is calm.
Here in Edinburgh, locals are familiar with McGregor’s love of bikes. His British documentary television series Long Way Round and Long Way Down, which originally aired on Sky 1, followed McGregor and his best friend, Charley Boorman, as they circumnavigated the globe on BMW motorcycles. McGregor calls that journey “the ultimate ride.”
Boorman, a TV presenter, actor, and travel writer, met McGregor on a movie set 20 years ago, when both men had baby daughters. They bonded quickly over their love of riding. “When you have a big passion for something—horseback riding, climbing—you always find a way to do it. And you’ll find any excuse to do it,” Boorman says.
During their trip, McGregor and Boorman ended up pushing their bikes through muddy fields, repairing wheel spokes, and dealing with broken body frames, each helping the other in turn as conditions required. “Ewan always has your back,” Boorman says.
Although McGregor uses his bikes now only “to get from A to B, if I’m not taking one of my kids somewhere,” he’s kept up with Moto Guzzi. For the past four years, the Italian company that built his first bike has hired him for its ad campaigns and gifts him a new bike each time. At the moment he has four modern Guzzis, including a V7 and a grand tourer, plus two of the brand’s police bikes from the early ’70s.
McGregor has crashed twice, one a forced slide in London traffic several years ago, where he “laid the bike down” in order to avoid hitting a pedestrian and broke his leg when the motorcycle fell on it. The other was a much closer call, though without injury. It was the late ’90s, and he was racing a Ducati 748 on the Brands Hatch Indy Circuit, a track outside of London. Somehow, as if in slow motion, he simply came off the bike at 100 mph. “On one corner, I went too wide, and I was annoyed with myself,” he says. “C’mon, c’mon, I thought. I tapped into this left-hander and …” The next thing he knew, he was standing upright, unhurt, in the middle of the track. “I had no knowledge of the in-between bits. I didn’t even know I’d crashed.”
His habit of embracing a challenge extends to other, newer obsessions. He’s been reading Born to Run, Christopher McDougall’s paean to long-distance running, and he maps out a 4-mile loop around Holyrood Park, a mile from Edinburgh Palace, on his phone. “I run clockwise,” he says, around Arthur’s Seat, the city’s highest point, up a big hill around the back, then “a great downhill.”
“His enthusiasm is contagious,” says Jennifer Connelly, who plays Swede’s beauty-queen wife, Dawn, in American Pastoral. “He’s always so positive, so happy, and supportive to work with.” McGregor signed on to play the lead role in the film in 2014. Shortly after, the original director was moved off the project, and McGregor fought for the opportunity to direct it himself.
“It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “The prep was the scariest part, because when you start off, you’re on your own.” He arrived on location in Pittsburgh 12 weeks before filming began, checking on the wallpaper in a therapist’s office and the kinds of cars on the street during a riot scene.
Connelly met McGregor for the first time only days before shooting started. “Ewan was very interested in listening to what people thought,” she says. “He didn’t steamroll anyone. At the same time, he was strong and confident in his choices as a director, because the opposite of that can be scary, too. He clearly knew where he was going.”
That conviction, he says, comes from the way he understood the book’s premise, that of parents learning to let go. “I’ve got four girls, so I know all about it,” McGregor says. “My eldest daughter is in her 20s, and she’s left home. I’ve experienced that, and it’s why I felt like I was the right guy to tell this story. My daughter taught me everything that I needed to know to play this part and to direct this film.”
His sense of duty even extended to the budget. “For me, it would’ve been embarrassing to be given $20 million and make it for $24 [million]. I wouldn’t sleep very well.”
For now, he’s enjoying the relative ease of starring in someone else’s film. “It’s nice to just think about the acting,” he says. And then there’s the promise of future motorcycle trips. “It’s just so much fun,” he says of his hobby of almost 30 years, which he plans to continue as long as he’s physically able. “Whether it’s just dawdling along enjoying the view or having your heart in your mouth on every corner, it certainly beats the hell out of jumping in a car.”