Sexy Beast
Vogue Magazine May 2003

He can play a romantic hero, a rogue, and an intergalactic warrior with equal conviction. But what makes Scottish actor Ewan McGregor so irresistibly suave?

Let me count the ways. Writes Vicki Woods. I'm in a beyond-snazzy, sixties-type bachelor apartment - all glass and chrome and leather - with the New York City skyline outside the window. Waitresses in frilled white aprons whisk past with trays of canapés pierced wit frilled white cocktail sticks. "Hey, there! How are you?" says a gorgeous blonde in a yellow gown. Her sixties-type flip hairdo puts me in mind of ….Doris Day. A passing waitress says, "Meatball?" and we both stare down at the glossy globes.

Wow - even the canapés look retro. (We pass. No meatballs right now, thank you.) Suddenly the crowd parts, and in shimmers and impossibly gorgeous tan, handsome, glamorous-looking man in a white tuxedo, with a head of hair so impeccably cut, colored, quaffed, parted, and groomed that it puts me in mind of ….Rock Hudson. He throws a flirty grin toward my friend in the yellow gown, and is promptly surrounded by a throng of women. We are on set, obviously. This is a Hollywood soundstage, not a New York bachelor apartment. Tossing the flirty grin is Ewan McGregor. In the blonde wig and the yellow gown (which looks like something
Oleg Cassini ran up for Jackie Bouvier before she married JFK) is Renee Zellweger.

So how come you get to work with all the seriously sexy leading men, Renee? I ask her blithely. I mean - Hugh (Grant), Colin (Firth), Jude (Law), and now yummy Ewan? Laughing, she bats her eyes and vamps: "I knooooow. Just luckly, I guess." The movie is Down with Love, a retro-cool homage to the classic sixties comedies (Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, Send Me No Flowers) in which Doris Day and Rock Hudson sparkled and sparred through the sex war on the cusp of the Kennedy era. Zellweger plays Barbara Novak,
the author of a pre-feminist manifesto that says down with love (and marriage and motherhood) and up with career (and sex and the single girl). This revolutionary thesis, a little before its time, hits New York City like a hurricane (Equality in the workplace! Women's empowerment! Oh, my!) And propels its author toward stratospheric fame and a knockout wardrobe of cute, candy-colored Coco
suits, worn with white gloves and adorable little pillowbox hats, not to mention the Cassini-and-Adolfo-inspired cocktail gowns. McGregor plays the guy who plans to take this uppity female down: Catcher Block - ace journalist/ladies' man/man's man/man-
about-town. Hence the tuxedo, in which (believe me) he's a sight to see.

"Strangely, not all actors look great in tuxedos." Says direction Peyton Reed, whose feature-film debut was 2000's cheerleader hoot Bring it On. "But Ewan looks…fantastic. We dyed his hair - and to me he's like a young Sean Connery in From Russia with Love." Indeed. McGregor has the same brazenly self-confident masculinity. "The one thing we need for this role was a guy who had a sense of danger about him, " says Reed. "And it's such a great era for clothes - you know? The pegged pants, the pointy shoes, the narrow ties." Down with Love deliberately sets out to reference the feel and the tone of the sex-comedy classics, using all the old bags of tricks - glorious Technicolor, fabulously fake and stagy sets, improbably crisp and colorful early-sixties costumes, split screens, the lot. It's Hollywood Then, crunched knowingly through a tight modern lens. For such a contemporary actor, whose crowded resume
has a big bunch of art-house/cult/experimental movies jammed alongside the multimillion-dollar shows. Ewan McGregor seems quite at home with the arcane of Old Hollywood. He knows all the movies; he watched them over and over on TV as a kid in Scotland.
"Dunno why. I think they must have played them a lot at the weekends," Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant - these were the actors he
loved. We're sitting outside craft services, on a coffee break between scenes. McGregor looks like a matinee idol from the neck up
(the haircut is truly awesome), but like any scruff7y actor from the neck down - T-shirt, jeans, sneakers. He's an absolute sexpot;
no doubt about it. Women are drawn toward him like moths.

The boyish good looks (he's 32) mesh with an assured and very grown-up manner. The combination is beguiling. You feel, instantly, that you're getting the real McGregor. He's an engaging talker - witty, confiding, keen to amuse. Great eye contact. Nice warm voice. Lilting Scottish accent. Flirts outrageously, but you never get the wrong idea. Tells a good tale, Makes you giggle. My interview tape
is embarrassingly full of snorts and honks and yells of barely stifled laugher (mine) as he talks me through An Actor's Life. He's
clearly having a blast on Down with Love. "I'm playing a leading man from back then, but it's like living the life of a leading man from back then. It's an incredible experience to be doing an exclusively studio based movie. We have dressing rooms," he says. "Not trailers. I bought a sixties car, and I drive it to the set every morning, work in the studio all day, and go home to my family. It's
brilliant. We're all having real Old Hollywood fantasy." No location work? He hoots and says, "We did four days in Universal Studios, up there on the back lot. Hilarious. We had to stop for the trams to go by with the tourists. We could hear the commentary: 'And
that's an Ac-tor…..They're shooting a Movie…."

He excuses himself for a minute and walks out to the studio parking lot to meet a slender woman in a big straw hat. Their body language is clearly intimate, and it turns out it's Eve Mavrakis, his wife of eight years, who has brought the children on set to see
their daddy. Mavrakis is French, dark and pretty, and speaks fluent Mandarin as well as English (she spent much of her childhood
in China, where her mother was a teacher). She wears a vest top and a nondescript cotton skirt as though it were Chanel couture,
in the enviable way Frenchwomen have. She's a production designer; they met on the set of a British TV series. Daughter Clara is
seven and chatters in French to her mom and nanny; toddler Esther is sleeping in her stroller. McGregor obviously adores having his family traveling with him and is cute with his kids. He's often said, "Everything I ever wanted is at home." Long ago, the British press tagged McGregor as "a girl's date, and a bloke's mate" - the latter phrase meaning a guy other guys like to hang with. The guy
thing is easy to explain: He's a star in any company, but he carries no star baggage. You do not have to take care of "the
personality." He's a team player; he does not march purposefully toward the bright part of the room where the limelight is.
(Which is a very Scottish trait: They're an egalitarian race.) So when he does guy things - bike-racing, beer drinking, whatever -
guys relate to him hombre a hombre. He's a famous biker: He owns a Suzuki Bandit 1200, a KTM Duke II 660 cc motorcross,
and a Honda Fireblade.

Phew, I say, having noted those carefully - anything else?" "Yeah - an MV Agusta. In Scotland Seven-fifty-in-line-four, baby. Aaaaall the way. Ha-ha!" When he told me cheerily, "I bought a sixties car," he meant a $3000,000 replica of a silver Porsche Spyder that killed James Dean. (Hey - starry.) But you can bet your life that every last and lowliest man on the crew (a) adored the car and (b) loved him for buying it. Peyton Reed told me that "men are drawn to Ewan because they wann be Ewan." As to the girl thing - McGregor is a very sexy actor, even if it's hard to pin down precisely why. Though handsome enough, he is not one of those screen actors - Jude Law, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, the young Paul Newman - who are so mesmerizingly beautiful they barely need to speak their lines. Nor does he play babe-magnet roles, exactly. (I mean - I loved Little Voice, but he played a dimbo bird-fancier.)
But whatever he plays, he plays with his whole being, with passion, and I think his female audiences feel that. Whether he is a Jedi knight, a heroin-raddled junkie (Trainspotting), a Regency buck (Emma), a wired, show-off, bisexual glam-rocker (Velvet Goldmine),
a bemused, lovesick poetaster (Moulin Rouge!), or even failed kidnapper with a lamentable haircut who's a head shorter than his
hostage (Cameron Diaz/A Life Less Ordinary), he burns into the female heart and stays there. I had to buy the DVD.

Forget the crazy movie - spin through to the hypnotic rock video where he and Cameron dance like Fred and Ginger to "Beyond the Sea." His Scottishness is important to McGregor. It's a part of his power. "If anyone calls me 'English,' I'll always correct them. I'm British, but I'm a Scot." (The lilting, dark-butterscotch voice has visceral impact-speaking or singing.) Maybe American audiences
can't tell the difference between Scottish and English - or couldn't care less - so I won't bore you with a philosophical dissertation on aspects of the Scottish antisyzygy and the like. Suffice it to say that the word Scot does not attract such descriptors as "foppish"
or floppy-haired" or "prissy" or "class-ridden," like the word Englishman (or English actor) does. McGregor's Hollywood calling card,
calls him a "classless aristocrat." McGregor shows no fear. Directors just know he'll do anything you'd want him to. And he's
fearless off set as he is on. He famously flew in the back seat of a Royal Air Force Tornado, with his big brother Colin, a Top Gun
RAF pilot, at the controls. Flight Lieutenant Colin McGregor tossed and rolled his kid brother upside down at 550 mph across the Scottish hillsides, a few hundred feet above ground. Was McGregor scared? "Not for one minute - swear to God!" he cackles,
rearing back in his chair at the memory. "I think it was because he's my brother. I had moments of, uh, extreme….sickness. But no fear." Envy? "No! I was just so proud of him, the he could do that."

The stunt was to raise money for McGregor's pet charity, Rachel House, the Scottish hospice for terminally sick children. "We have only one hospice for children in Scotland, and there are at least 20 in England," he says. He's trying to help build a second, and the money is halfway there. He visits Rachel House as often as he can, and talks urgently and at length about how it's a joyous place,
full of life and color, even though you know that all the children are there because they're near to death. "The kids are quite amazing wee people, and I think the people that volunteer to look after them do some of the most amazing work in the world." He was born in Crieff, in Perthshire, where his parents were both teachers, and he went to a (semi-posh) private school, Morrison Academy. Crieff ("gateway to the Highlands") is pretty, but it's a small town, a tweedy, buttoned-up conservative place whose citizens must have
been mighty shocked when the McGregor boy suddenly leaped to fame as a foulmouthed, smacked-out, lowlife junkie in
Trainspotting. Heaven only knows what they thought of his naked, full-frontal, bisexual carryings-on in Peter Greenway's The Pillow Book, where he was painted with Chinese calligraphy. No body part was spared - especially that part you don't normally see blown
up on-screen. (After his parents viewed it, his dad sent McGregor a fax saying, "I'm glad to see you've inherited on of my major assets.")

While his brother was a straight-A student and ace at school sports, McGregor was…not. The only thing he shone at was music.
He played the French horn. "and all my family on my dad's side is a pipe band." Bagpipes? "Aye, we're all in the McGregor Family Pipe Band!" He reels through a list of McGregor aunties and uncles and sister-in-law. "We played New York city on Tartan Sunday a couple of years ago, and for Prince Rainier in Monaco, for a big charity do. We do a nice wee 'Amazin Grace.' " When I asked him
how many kilts he has, he says, "Four! Two in McGregor tartan, one in the Millennium tartan, and one's just black. It's not a real
one; it's just a fashion kilt. Goes nice with a T-shirt and a pair of boots." He wanted to be an actor from the age of nine. Partly
because of his uncle Denis, his mother's brother, who would roll up to Perthshire from London (London!), and dazzle his young
nephew with his sheepskin waistcoats, his beads, his bare feet (bare feet!), and tell fabulous tales about being in the movies (Star Wars!). Denis Lawson was in all three of the originals. (He played Lieutenant Wedge Antilles.) McGregor saw them all, of course,
and was determined to get his own light saber. Once day, his mom was driving him in her car and said, "You know, you can leave school if you want to."

At sixteen, he didn't need telling twice, and ran off to join the local repertory-theater company before leaving Scotland for London and drama school. Before he even finished the three-year course, he was on the books of a London agent. Every piece of work he does,
he does because he wants to: He has no thoughts of numbers, ratings, weekend box office. "It's a feeling of - I've gotta be in that!
Like reading a really good book; you don't want it to end. Lindy Kin - she's been my agent since I was nineteen and ah, God! I love
her to bits - she knows exactly what I'm about." It's King who sifts his scripts and sends him "the top, the most interesting ones. Whether they're made for five bob-ha' penny [a Britishism for 'peanuts'] or not, it makes no odds," he says. Makes no odds whether
or no they bomb at the box office, either, if he likes the work he did. He loves even those born to blush largely unseen, like Velvet Goldmine, on which he slaved away, even pursuing financial backing as the shooting stopped and started. "For me that's a film I'm really proud of because it was dangerous and fantastical and weird. And so worthwhile. And he's a great guy, Todd [Haynes]." McGregor's work rate is famously frenetic - he's made 20 movies in ten years, of ten short back-to-back.

As he sites in the L.A. sunshine with his head full of Down with Love, he forces his mind back to what he was doing just a few weeks before: Young Adam, which was a film he "had to do, had to. It's a brilliant script, fucking brilliant, from a novel by Alexander Trocchi, set in the fifties in Glasgow. Set in Scotland, young Scottish director, who also wrote the script, all that. It's a great book, but it's a better script. It's dark, e-roar-tic, brilliant." At this point he bursts into maniacal giggles and tells me about a sex scene with (rising British actress) Emily Mortimer and a bowel of custard, which leaves me feeling a little breathless. I have to press a coke can to my blushing cheek as he acts out both parts, his and the hapless Mortimer's, with a very colorful shot-by-shot description. "E-roar-tic" doesn't come near the full picture, believe me. "It's an insane scene." He says. "I have sex with Tilda Swinton, and two other woman, as well. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! [Camp voice] So-oo many girls! So-oo little time. "I finished Young Adam a day before I got here. We wrapped on a Friday and I flew out here with my family on the Saturday and I started work on the Monday."

And what's next?

"I go to Alabama, to do Big Fish with Tim Burton, who is fantastic, and Albert Finney plays my father - he's a diamond. Amazing
cast. Then it's Star Wars again straight after. Then I'm in Flora Plum, with Jodie Foster directing - I have always wanted to work with her, she's amazing."

Still fanning my scarlet face, I ask, and who do you sleep with in Big Fish? He says, "Nobody. Oh-well, Allison Lohman. But I think
it's all off-screen."

And, sensing my obvious disappointment, he says silkily, "It's not all about sex, dah-ling. Most of it is. But, not all of it."