Easy Rider
W magazine February 2002
After three high-profiles (as Jedi knight, a singing poet and a U.S ranger), the voluble Ewan Mcgregor has made peace with Hollywood. These days, it's those british Hugh grant romances that drive him nuts.

The Ambra deli in northwest London, with its fluorescent lights, humming refrigerators and shelves crammed with panettone and tomato sauce, isn't a likely backdrop for a power breakfast, but it suits Ewan McGregor just fine. On this damp winter morning in St. John's wood, the Scottish heartthrob is standing outside Ambra, dressed in dirty denim jeans and a chocolate brown shearling jacket, puffing on a Marlboro. A few mintues later, when McGregor walks through the door, pale and sleepy-eyed, the man behind the counter turns from the spresso machine and asks his friend how it's going.

"Come stai, Ewan?"

"sto bene," the actor replies in a accent worthy of Marcello Mastroianni. As it turns out, these are the only Italian words McGregor knows.

"I like to call myself an actor," he says with a big smile. "The least I can do is sound like one."

Dropping in and out of character seems like second nature to McGregor, but in the end, he admits, acting is always something of a test. "I love starting a movie and not knowing if I can pull the character off, he says, sipping a double espresso, "and then finding out a year later if I've done it or not."

He hasn't done badly so far. Mcgregor, who turns 31 in March, made his first film, being Human, just nine years ago and only popped onto the public's radar screen in 1996, when he starred as the heroin addict Mark Renton in Trainspotting. Today he is one of Britain's highest-paid actors-commanding more per film than Kate Winslet, Michael Caine, or Liam Neeson. He was even voted the nation's "sharpest man" in a recent poll by British Esquire. In the poll, which measured humor, talent, success, passion and respect for peers, McGregor beat out the soccer hero David Beckham and his buddy Jude Law, with whom he cofounded the production company Natural Nylon. Not that he particularly relishes the honor:

"Those titles quite literally mean absolutely nothin to me," he says over the drone of the deli's refrigerators. "I don't really understand it: I'm not the sharpest man in Britain, I'm no the sharpest man anywhere, and I don't live my life as a publicity campaign for myself. The media is a mystery to me." But men's-mag readers aren't the only ones enamored of McGregor. Baz Luhrmann, who directed him opposite Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge calls him 'dangerously charming and loveable. He has a beguiling energy which is lethal." Unlike some actors who profess ambivalence about celebrity, McGregor's approach to work bears out his claim. Although he now has an enviable choice of roles, that doesn't mean he's always looking to be the center of attention. For instance, in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, based on Mark Bowden's nonfiction account of the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, McGregor plays company clerk John Grimes, a frustrated pencil pusher who moans about never seeing any action. He eventually gets his chance, but neither the role nor the character is particularly grand. In fact, McGregor will most likely be remembered as the blue-eyed guy who made the coffee- as the bullets were flying overhead. Still the actor lobbied hard to be in the film. "I couldn't stop reading the book," he says. "I couldn't quite believe it was all true. I didn't even know what the roles were going to be, but I got in touch with Ridley and told him I wanted to be a part of the telling of this story.

If you're always looking for leading roles, then you can't explore all the other possibilities out there." Scott says he knew when he was casting the film that McGregor would make the ideal Grimes, but never believed the actor would accept the role. "We didn't think it was enough for him," the director recalls, adding, "A lot of actors start out by demonstrating great talent, but then they begin looking for conventional, starring roles. The risk is that you start using up your franchise and you become pigeonholed. Actors should be selective so that they remain special- and that's just what Ewan is doing." Luhrmann agrees that McGregor's approach is serving him well.

"He is in full command of his powers now, and he's spreading his wings," he ways. "He started as a cult antihero and has evolved to the point where he's singing and dancing in one film and holding a machine gun in another. He is scarily intelligent and talented as an actor."

Black Hawk Down chronicles the day that 140 elite Delta commandos and Ranger infantry were ordered into Mogadishu to capture two top lieutenants of the Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. The raid, during which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and 18 U.S soldiers and more than 500 Somalis died, was regarded as such a disaster that two weeks later President Clinton pulled all U.S. troops out of the country, ending their participation in what was supposed to be a humanitarian mission. In preparation for the film, McGregor and his co-stars (including Josh Hartnett and Tom Sizemore) went through Rangers boot camp at Fort Benning, Georgia-doing what he calls "ball-breaking" exercises and sleeping in "shitty, old barracks.

" But the experience granted him a rare window into the Rangers' mentality. "There is a huge pride among the guys there," he says, stirring his second espresso. "It became clear to us then the responsibility we had to portray those guys to the best of our abilities, to maintain that pride and not to portray them as a group who got it wrong and messed up." Indeed, the actor seems to have come away with some of his character's taste for front-line action. "I'm sick of America and Britain going to war and doing air bombing for weeks on end," he says adamantly. "If they actually believe it's a war, then they should be sending in ground troops. That's what soldiers train for. It's their job, and most of them wouldn't thank you for keeping them from doing it."

During the shoot, no one knew how eerily relevant the film's story line would become in light of the terrorist attacks of September 11. The film was originally scheduled for release in March, but director Scott and producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Joe Roth decided to push it up to late December-partly due to the changed national mood and partly because they believed the film had serious Oscar potential. Black Hawk Down marks McGregor's third experience on a major Hollywood film (after Star Wars Episode I-The Phantom Menace and Moulin Rouge), and while the actor who once complained that Hollywood treats actors like "prostitutes" still professes no desire to "crack into the American film industry" or -God forbid- move to Los Angeles, he has softened his views somewhat.

"I used to rag on Hollywood a lot, but I've lightened up," he says. "There are a lot of bad films made there, and a lot of good ones too. It's the same here. As soon as there is a lot of money involved, then uncreative people start to want guarantees on their investement."

Indeed, McGregor now aims his pique at the British film industry which, he complains, has become more Americanized and less independent. "Cheesy romances with Hugh Grant plus an American actress, with plots about people in desperate need to get married or get laid are what seem to be the mandate for British films at the moment," he says, leaning forward in his seat. "If films reflect everything in life, then there are dark stories to be told and light stories to be told. But a lot of people don't like the idea of the dark stories. I hate any form of censorship. And you can't stop artists from making art." The mention of art starts the actor off on a tangent about a fellow Scotsman, Martin Creed, who the night before had won the 20, 000 pounds Turner prize (awarded annually to the best British artist under 50) for his installation: an empty room with a light that flicks on and off. Putting on a broad Glasgow accent, McGregor does a nice approximation of the artist's acceptance speech, which he'd caught on TV that morning: "Well, I don't know what it means really, but when the light's on, you can see people, and when it's off, you can't." McGregor lets out a pleased-with-himself laugh. "Creed's quite right. Not for me to say what it's about. Twenty grand for a light going on and off. Not bad, eh?" He also takes a shot at Madonna, who managed to include a profanity in her brief presentation of the award.

"Madonna made an arse of herself," he says. "It was really embarrassing, I thought. She was trying to be provocative."

McGregor well known for his own gutter mouth, should know. Ask him about his own Bandit 1200 motorcycle, and he pronounces it an "urban, f-in' lunatic monster-bike," making revving motions with his hands. McGregor's stable also boasts Honda Fireblade 900cc and Ducati 748 race bikes; a KTM Duke 2650cc single-cylinder motocross, "which you can't stop without going up on the front wheel, and you can't take off without going up on the back one"; and a 1978 Moto Guzzi, which he's had completely rebuilt. "I've always loved bikes but was never allowed to have one," he explains. "I got my first one when I was 19 when I was away from home-and knew I could get away with it." McGregor says the recognition that Moulin Rouge has been getting so far-he won a European Film Award for best actor and has been nominated for a Golden Globe- is brilliant," but he prefers not to speculate about the O-word. "It's one of the most challenging films I've ever done- and every bit as dangerous," he says. "I mean, we were bursting into song, which is something that just isn't done anymore. Had we not spent so much time and effort on it, it could have been the biggest disaster of all time." As for co-star Kidman, McGregor is still spitting mad about the rumors that the two had an on-set affair. "I don't know why people are saying this, why all this happened, " he says, exasperated. "They ask me about it to my face, which I think is incredibly rude- they would never have the gall to ask her. It's a horrible thing to say about someone. I mean, I'm a married man with two kids. Who do they f-ing think they're speaking to? It's shite. All unfounded."

McGregor, who lives in London with his wife, Eve Mavrakis, just became a father for the second time when his daughter Esther Rose was born in early November. While McGregor is no lothario, he certainly doesn't shy away from matters of the flesh. In the spring, he'll begin shooting what he describes as a "dark erotic piece" called Young Adam, costarring Tilda Swinton and based on the cult novel by Alexander Trocchi about the moral decline of an educated man in 1950's Scotland. "The sex in it is very cold and detached-it's an act like any other, without emotion, which I think makes it very erotic," McGregor says. "It also means w can push the envelope during the sex scenes. It's going to be a very uncomfortable watch for the men in the audience," he promises with a wicked little laugh. Also in the popeline are Nautica, a Hitchockian thriller set on a yacht in the Caribbean, and the two upcoming Star Wars prequels.

After that? McGregor isn't sure, though there's no doubt he'll aim to balance his star turns with dark, thoughtful art films. "Celebrity is a road to nowhere," he says, "because once you've chosen that path, you can never be enough of a celebrity. Celebrity is meaningless; acting means something. And acting is what I love to do. It's what I was meant to do."