"Boy's Own Story" The Times Magazine January 12, 2002

Somehow after Moulin Rouge- where we saw so much of Ewan McGregor's tonsils and his new-found abilities to be an old-fashioned leading man- you expect him to be larger, fleshier, more powerful. But he's still this scrag of a boy that, in the Scottish vernacular, "Canny sit at peace." He's been talking all day about his new film, Black Hawk Down, and by 5pm he's wriggling in his armchair in Claridge's like a wean waiting for the school bell. But he's surprisingly cheerful and eager to please for someone who has been twice to Los Angeles and once to Berlin in a week; his mind is engaged and only his body wanders off. Unlike your typical Hollywood actor who'd be in his dull anecdotage by this time of day. McGregor is still enjoying his own stardom. He still has something to say, and we like that. Of course he's stuck in people's minds as the glorious Renton from Trainspotting, because he still looks and sounds much the same.

When he walks along, his head protrudes and his shoulders lag behind. He's got a leather bomber, jeans, black bovver boots and the inevitable cap-sleeved T-shirt from which his skinny arms dangle. The only new item is his haircut, which fashionable people call the "Hoxton fin", a short back and sides with a squinty Mohican on top, also favoured by Travis. McGregor is thin because he's been playing a soldier in Black Hawk Down: "If I ate anything it went on my face, and Rangers are meant to be lean." The $50 million film is a dramatic reconstruction of the American elite forces assault on Mogadishu, Somalia in October 1993. Their mission was to abduct top lieutenants of the Somali warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, as part of a strategy to quell the civil war and famine that was ravaging the country. The supposed short, sharp assault became a long, agonising disaster, as 19 Americans died, and more than 70 were injured.

For 18 hours the young Rangers and veteran Delta force soldiers remained trapped and wounded under fire in the most hostile district of Mogadishu until a rescue convoy arrived. "Outnumbered and surrounded, tensions flare, friends are lost, alliances are formed and soldiers learn the true nature of war and heroism," goes the film company's blurb. Oddly, our other favourite Scot from Trainspotting, Ewen Bremner also has a role in the film. McGregor was delighted: "I met Ewen on way to the airport and I'd not seen him for a long time and we were having a laugh envisaging a scene in Black Hawk Down where he looks over to me and I look over to him and say: "Spud, what the f-are we doing here?" Bremner had just finished filming Pearl Harbor. "He'd been almost killed doing the boot camp training for the role, you know a full barracks situation, with them shouting at you, and waking you up at 3am to do tasks you never had enough time for. Anyway, there was a guy in a Ranger cap standing there at the airport baggage carousel and we were both terrified." Fortunately, the Rangers were fairly gentle with the cast.

There was early-morning physical and weapons training, but there were also classroom exercises on how to dress wounds. "I enjoyed it because I got an insight into their pride in their regiment, and the pride in fight for the men on either side of you. " says McGregor. "I was filled up with the sense that these men we were working with had lost friends and that we had a huge onus to portray these characters and represent the Ranger division in a way that did them proud. The people who died there, their families may watch this film and if we don't do them justice we're showing them disrespect." American's may feel differently about Black Hawk Down- it was released there early to make last year's Oscar nominations-but for many of the British film critics watching our preview, its attempted vrisimilitude brought tedium. I would have walked out of this two-and-a-half hour screening had I not been carefully tracking McGregor for interview purposes.

While a bloody war movie such as Saving Private Ryan managed to hold the attention tight, not merely with battle scenes but with a proper plot and deep regard for humanity, Black Hawk Down is all carnage, and not enough character. McGregor does rise to the occasion when he's allowed, providing some wit among other pedestrian performances, but his appearances are all too rare. What Black Hawk Down does prove, along the gilded road of McGregor's career, is that he can play an American and a soldier with ease, and that's bankable in Hollywood. His role is that of an ironic clerk who keeps his head down makes very good coffee, avoiding battle whenever possible. Sent in unexpectedly to Mogadishu by helicopter, Company Clerk Grimes ducks and weaves and then turns out to have guts of iron. There's a good scene where he calmly makes coffee for a mate as the battle roars on a few yards away. He's been shot in the foot, but seems unbothered. He takes his boot off and looks at the bullet hole, saying: "Ooh, I never felt that."

McGregor is perhaps too young to have been brought up on M*A*S*H, but his on-screen soldiering is similar in its devil-may-care style. McGregor says of his character: "In the beginning he thinks f--- this, then gets lost, then he gets blown up. They're not just shooting him, they're aiming bombs at him, and then slowly he gets his warlegs or whatever you call them. One of the real soldiers advising us told me how it's one thing being under fire, but another when you know one guy out there has targeted you. As soon as you're aware of it, you take it so personally and get angry- 'How dare you try and kill me'- and you rise to it and then perform, and that's what happened to old Grimes."

McGregor seems to have taken to firing back blanks with some joy. "Very loud, and the 50-cal machine guns actually sent shock waves out to your chest when they fired towards you. It was just an awesome amount of noise," he says with boyish delight. I suppose if your battle training is largely from Star Wars, it's hard to take the business very seriously. When McGregor played Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode I- The Phantom Menace, the apocryphal story was that he enjoyed fighting with the light sabre so much he made "wham-swish-kazoom" noises as he was being filmed, and the sound crew had to tell him to shut up. McGregor continues the role in the next Star Wars film, Attack of the Clones, he says, making a face at the kitschiness of it. "Ooh, bad title," I say, and it's clear that he feels I'm not being quite respectful enough of the Star Wars genre: "Light sabre fighting is actually quite tricky, and I am of an age where the whole thing was part of my childhood so I take it very seriously. I was so into it as a kid, it's quite exciting to do and you can get very fast at it-we're fighting with metal bars…" He sees me looking at him with some amusement and grins: "Oh, but you're a girl, what would you know about it?"

Talking of boys' games, what was it like hanging out on the flim set in Morocco with an all-male crew-cutted cast for four months? "There were 30 of us guys in this hotel, but I took a lot of time on my own after filming. I only managed to get back to London a couple of times." Then, there was his French wife, Eve Mavrakis, and five year old daughter, Clara, and now there's a new bab, Esther Rose. "It was interesting, bizzare, being in an all-male situation. I like being around ladies as well," he says smiling. We had heard that. "David Bailey once told me his biggest nightmare was found guys in a small car, and I kind of get that." Instead of carousing on set, McGregor claims he played chess into the "wee small hours" with Ty Burrel, who plays Wilks in the film. "It's not often in our life that you get a lot of time to yourself, so I did a lot of reading, too. I could have gone bananas with all the young guys, but I didn't." Is this part of the new squeaky-clean image of a family man who has put the wild excesses of youth behind him, which McGregor is now putting out in the popular press? I think so. "It's funny, but I felt there were the young mad guys, and the big, older serious guys, and I was somewhere in the middle. I had my thirtieth birthday on the movie and I thought: I'm not one of the young screaming-around guys that I used to be." Which is in some ways a shame, because we used to very much enjoy the stories of his drinking and partying round the Cannes film festival, and other dens of iniquity.

McGregor says Moulin Rouge with Nicole Kidman played a part in his change of image from wild child to leading man. "It's great. I've never been happier than I am at the moment. I've got the feeling Moulin Rouge put me somewhere up there, and certainly overseas people are more serious about getting me to play leading roles and pinning a film on that." Nowadays, the Seventh Sexiest Man in the World (according to tabloid polls) hangs out at his large house in St. John's Wood and concentrates on his role as father. "I've got a garden shed," he says, revealingly. He takes his daughter Clara to school, and I've observed him and Eve of an evening in The Engineer, a pleasant gastropub in Primrose Hill. She is involved in raising money and interest in the children's Saturday morning film shows at the Hampstead Everyman, and McGregor has helped in the campaign to save the local library. All in all, McGregor's parents-teachers at the private Morrison's Academy in Crieff-must be pleased with their offspring's return to the bosom of the upright middle classes. "I was away from my family longer than I'd cared to have been on Black Hawk Down ," says McGregor. He took his wife and daughter with him to Australia for a year when he filmed Moulin Rouge and Star Wars there. "But being away is part of what I do, it's part of being an actor," he shrugs. Does that mean he can live two separate lives? "I don't have two lives because it's all about my family, now more than ever before. This is what I do so that my family's secure and happy together, and if it means going away for a bit, well there are lots of other dads in other walks of life who do that. So it's fine and I love it."

It must be preferable being the lead actor to being the family baggage that comes with him on shoots. "Yeah, it's harder for Eve, but she's a mum, she's got a baby, so she's got plenty to do. Eve's brilliantly intelligent and understands the whole game. And she writes stuff and always love being wherever she is. She moved around a lot as a child, and what's more important to her is us being together rather than where we are. We'll take Clara out of school if we have to. Being with your dad for four or five months is more important than not being disrupted and having a tutor. Movies wreck lives, and I won't let it happen to us." The next film he hopes to make is set on untasty stretches of the Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland in the Fifties. With its gritty, monochrome industrial landscape, Young Adam will be more a thing of horror than of beauty, but if it is well directed, it may put the seal on McGregor's career as a serious British actor, and not merely a Hollywood hunk. The film is based on a novel by Alexander Trocchi, a Scottish writer who died early of drugs, drink and misbehaviour.

McGregor will play the part of the antihero, Joe, a university-educated man who takes a labourer's job on a coal barge and proceeds to sleep with the owner's wife right under his eye. As Joe disintegrates morally, and he becomes more and more promiscuous, the physical being used to block out his mental torment, with sex and death never far apart. "It will be fantastic to play something nihilistic like this after Moulin Rouge and Star Wars. It's a brillant dark and beautiful script, moody acting, with very little dialogue." Tilda Swinton will play Ella, the wife- "she's extraordinary" - and they hope Peter Mullan will play the husband. The film isn't short on sex scenes. Fortunately, McGregor is known to have no shame about going full frontal-you may remember his fine naked performances in Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book and in Velvet Goldmine. In fact seems to be looking forward to getting his kit of. "Joe's so detached that sex is kind of a cold act, but as a result I find them very erotic in the book, and I don't know if that's something weird about me or not. In the film, I think the sex scenes will be real marks of this guy's decline." It's all a most interesting prospect, but re-creating the Fifties is expensive. "Scottish Screen should've coughed up. I speak to Tilda a lot on the phone and we both want to make it very much. I just despair really. I'm not asking for much money. I felt personally let down because my success is pointed out by my British movies. I've always stuck to them, and I didn't go straight off to Hollywood. It's just upsetting the feeling they've turned their back on you a bit."

When I suggest McGregor could help out himself, he says his own film company is not in a position to get involved. Does McGregor feel Scotland is partially rejecting him because he's run away to greener, greenbacked pastures? "Not really. It's always a problem if you move away, and I've lived in London since 1989. But if you don't go back to Scotland people'll complain, and if you do go there, they say: 'Oh, aren't we good enough for you any more?' Aww, it's hopeless." But McGregor is not at all deracinated. His accent seems unchanged since the day he left the private Morrison's Academy. (Hollywood directors probably think he sounds a tad rough, but Scots consider him to be bordering on genteel) He moved to London to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and stayed on, but he returns regularly to see his parents and brother who live in Perthshire.

"I love Scotland. I miss it very much. Funnily enough when I was in Austalia for a year filming, I missed Scotland more than London. I had flashbacks to where I'd been when I was a kid, up the west coast in Arisaig and Mallaig and I'd have these flashes in my head of images from Scotland. Weird. I've been up there a lot this year, just outside of Crieff." I say I know Crieff well. Used to go there with my parents for holidays at Crieff Hydro, a sort of dilapidated pink-wallpapered, parlour-palmed unlicensed hotel, where you snuck in your own wine. "Did you, did you?" says McGregor weighing this up. "I'm surprised I didn't try to pull you when I was a kid, I probably did actually. Crieff Hydro, was where we used to go and find girls, nice country girls." I think it's best to move the conversation in another direction, so we play Property Fantasy instead. "I want to get a bothy right up north. I stayed in one with friends when I was 12 or 13, a little two-up two-down stone house. Beautiful, with no fence around it, and then the Highlands…" He does a blue-eyed stare into the distance. You'd think he was an actor or something. Then he continues: "I'd rather have it completely out of the way instead of having a house in Sussex or somewhere that doesn't mean anything to me. I'd rather have it in Scotland. On a weekend I could fly to Inerness and take a cab to the place and have an old Land Rover there. Somewhere you could get up in the morning and walk out and walk on and just keep walking until you've had enough."

For McGregor, Sunset Boulevard just doesn't compare.