A rock and a hard place
Big Issue September 2003

Ewan McGregor returns to our screens in two new movies- both set in the recent past but very different in tone. By Bruno Lester

Trainspotting saw him dive headfirst in to ‘the worst toilet in Scotland’; Moulin Rouge had him dueting with Nicole Kidman while his role as swashbuckling Ben Kenobi in the Star Wars films- the third due next summer- led to him being immortalized as a collectible action figure. Ewan McGregor has had nothing if not an eclectic career to date. Now after a period of absence from our screens, the likeable 32 year old Scot has two new films about to be released which, although both set in the relatively recent past, could not be more different. Down with Love is a homage to the retro-cool of the Sixties, with McGregor playing against type (if this most versatile of actors can be said to have a ‘type’) as a Rock Hudson style romantic lead opposite the distinctly Doris Day like Renee Zellweger. The first of the two new films to be released however, Young Adam, is perhaps more what we might expect, being described by McGregor as “dark, erotic, brilliant”. It was a film that he felt he simply “had to do”. “It was set in Scotland, with a young Scottishdirector, who also wrote a brilliant script, set in Fifties Glasgow. It’s a great book-by Alexander Trocchi- but it’s an even better script.” Young Adam also represents the re-emergence of McGregor’s pronounced predilection for nudity, which his legion of admirers have found woefully absent from his most recent films. In Young Adam, he even manages to have a steamy time of it with a bowl of custard. “It’s an insane scene,” laughs McGregor gleefully. “I have sex with Tilda Swinton and two other women as well. So many girls, so little time… “The sex is very cold and detached,” he continues, disconcertainly enthusiastic, “it’s an act like any other, without emotion, which I think makes it erotic. It also means we can push the envelope during the sex scenes It’s going to be a very uncomfortable watch for the men in the audience.”

Uncomfortable or not, if there is a nude acting envelope to be pushed, McGregor, it seems, will have his trousers off quicker than you can say ‘windowless manilla’. He says that he positively enjoys acting in the buff because, “there is something incredibly powerful about it, like swimming naked. Usually you’d get arrested for that sort of thing, but I get paid.” Ever since his first ‘kit off’ scene, for a long-forgotten BBC costume drama (when a not particularly well-endowed stuntman convinced the actor that he would never use a nude stand-in again), McGregor has entered in to the spirit of the thing, and played a starring role in some fairly wild sex scenes, most noticeably in Pillow Book and Velvet Goldmine. Fortunately for him, his wife, Eve Mavrakis, takes it all in her stride. “It’s part of the job and she’s a cracker,” says McGregor. “You can justify it in that sense but ultimately she is going to watch me pretend to have sex with somebody on screen. And no matter how much you rationalize it, that’s tough on her. It needs to be talked about.” McGregor is fiercely protective of his family (he and Mavrakis have two daughters, Clara Mathilde, six, and one-year-old Esther Rose) and doesn’t even sign autographs when they are around: “My wife and kids are the best things in my life, “he says quietly, “and we’ve got every right to our privacy.” Although set in Manhattan, Down with Love was actually shot in Hollywood, enabling McGregor to go home to his family, who decamped from the UK for the duration of the shoot, at the end of each day. “It was the nicest thing,” he says. “It was great to come to L.A. and get a bit of sun. I loved the routine. Leaving them in the morning, going to work, and going back to them. It was like real life.”

McGregor went straight from making the gritty and urban Young Adam to the sophisticated and urbane Down With Love, and admits that the change of pace wasn’t easy. “It was very difficult to capture the distinct rhythm of the film’s dialogue- I started rehearsing Down With Love just after I had finished making that dark, introspective, erotic low-budget movie in Scotland,” he recalls “The films couldn’t have been more different and I remember a day where I was thinking, ‘This is the one where I’m not going to be able to pull it off’ “It’s such a specific style of playing comedy that we just don’t do anymore. The rule when I started training was: You don’t play the comedy, but in Down With Love, you do. As a result, it feels kind of slapped on from the outside, so it felt kind of uncomfortable at first.” Luckily, he knew the kind of films which inspired Down With Love (think Pillow Talk and Send Me No Flowers) because he saw so many of them on television while growing up in Crieff, near Perth. “I remember them so well. Rock Hudson seemed to be breezing through them and having a good time. When he laughs, it looks like it’s him having a great laugh. So I tried to follow suit.”

Next year, after a quiet couple of years, McGregor appears in a brace of big films. First out is Tim Burton’s Big Fish, based on the Daniel Wallace novel, and then there’s the little matter of the final (for the moment) Star Wars film. “I’m glad there’s only one more Star Wars left to do,” says McGregor, admitting that he has found the huge amount of blue screen work involved in the films “terribly difficult. There’ll be an awful lot of it in the new one, and I’ve got to find some way to make it easier. It’s not that I’m bad at it- in fact, I’d like to think I’m rather good at it. It’s a skill I’ve learned, but it doesn’t give back the satisfaction that you get working with another actor.” But blue screens or no blue screens, McGregor is of an age which places him perfectly in the original Star Wars target audience and appearing in such a central role in the saga- along the way unsurping his uncle, actor Dennis Lawson, who appeared in the original trilogy- plainly remains something of a big deal to him. He is obviously delighted at the prospect of appearing alongside Chewbacca in the new film. “Star Wars was the first film I went to see at the cinema,” he remembers. “Later my family had it on tape. I watched it on video over a hundred times. I used to know every word in Star Wars, and my friends used to take parts, and we’d just do the whole dialogue to it as we watched it. So it was very bizarre when I first put on my Jedi gear. Putting on Jedi gear, taking off his pants or diving headfirst into ‘the worst toilet in Scotland’ – it’s in a day’s work for Ewan McGregor.

Young Adam is released on September 26 and Down With Love on October 3.