Ewan McGregor:
Straight Up
Sometime after his second pint of ale, when Ewan McGregor has
already explained how to cure hangovers and discussed his propensity
for taking off his clothes, he will have second thoughts about
the extent to which he has aired his hatred for modern Hollywood.
"I forget when I'm talking like this that it's going to be
written down and read by thousands of people. I'm always rude
about people and I slag off Hollywood really badly. " His
eyebrows wrinkle in concern. And then he grins slyly. "Secretly,
I really like that."
Ewan hasn't run
screaming from the prospect
of American stardom, but neither has he
courted it; he lives eight time zones away from Beverly Hills,
doesn't have a publicist, and, as he
points out, rarely passes up the chance to slag off Hollywood
as a cultural desert. But then, he's
also signed on to play the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars
prequels, which will ensure
his fame well into the next century.
Here is how Obi-Wan
Kenobi Jr. shows up at the local pub: black jeans, Adidas sneakers,
and a
sweaty T-shirt with some Japanese writing. Diesel sunglasses rest
on top of his spiky haircut.
Squint hard and you might be able to imagine his twenty-six pounds
lighter, as the heroin addict
Renton in Trainspotting (he lost the weight by giving up drinking
for two months). But stare right
at him and he might be anyone--the guy from the realtor's office
around the corner, a humanities
graduate student, an actor--anyone. In person, he's less than
iconic. On-screen, he turns that anonymity into startling versatility.
At age twenty-six, Ewan has compiles a resume of dozens of characters.
If you haven't seen him in Trainspotting, maybe you caught him
looking less gaunt as a French-horn player in Brassed Off or a
hapless thief holding Nurse Hathaway hostage in a convenience
store on ER. You might even have watched him play a
cleverdick newspaper reporter in Shallow Grave, a London dandy
in Emma, or a
calligraphy canvas in The Pillow Book.
And now, in A
Life Less Ordinary, he plays a failed janitor-novelist who kidnaps,
then falls in love with, the boss's daughter, played by Cameron
Diaz. It's a romantic comedy with a lot more mall appeal than
the travails of Scottish heroin addicts. But if stardom is beckoning,
Ewan doesn't want to think about
it; there are more important matters to worry about. "No
no no," he insists. "I'll get the next round."
When Ewan was
filming the thriller Nightwatch with Nick Nolte and Patricia Arquette
in Los
Angeles, he started craving the countryside--plants and birds
and rocks and things. To soothe
himself, he watched golf on television. He loves the sport, although
he's been known to lose a
dozen balls in a round and he has no taste for the upper-cruse
country clubs.
"In Scotland,
there's not the same elitist thing with golf," he says. "We
used to play a lot on public
courses, just for something to do. When I was fourteen, I got
thrown off a golf course for
swearing. After every shot I would get really angry, screaming
'F***! C**t! F***ing c**t!'
Eventually, this guy drove up in a tractor and told me I had to
leave because the other golfers had
been complaining. So I had to walk back in shame with my clubs.
I didn't play for a long time
after that."
Because you got
ejected?
"No, I just
got fed up being crap."
Ewan was born
March 31, 1971, and grew up in rural Crieff, Scotland. He had
a poster of Elvis
Presley on his wall, and used to saunter around imagining that
he was Elvis. But when he became
a teenager, he changed heroes--to Billy Idol. He's spike his hair
before school, listening to "White
Wedding" and "Rebel Yell." Ewan even played drums
in a band, the Scarlet Pride, with red paint
in his hair and bandannas knotted around his knees.
His father taught
gym at Morrison's Academy, a local boarding school. Ewan and his
older
brother (now a Royal Air Force pilot) got a special deal as day
students. Big brother cracked the
textbooks; Ewan didn't. What Ewan had wanted, since age nine,
was to be an actor. At first he
had no idea what actors actually did--he just knew that his uncle,
Denis Lawson (most famous for
Local Hero), would show up for family visits barefoot, wearing
beads and sheepskin waistcoats,
giving people flowers. This seemed impossibly glamorous to young
Ewan.
Eventually his
parents decided that an interest in academics would not magically
appear. They let
him drop out of school at age sixteen and work for the nearby
Perth Theatre, where he pulled
ropes backstage and donned a turban for a supernumerary role in
their version of A Passage to
India. Six months later, Ewan went to drama school in Kirkcaldy,
Scotland; a year after that, he
transferred down to Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London,
the big leagues. (Uncle
Denis helped him with his audition monologues).
Ewan loved some
classes, like an improvisation course that verged on therapy,
and was bored
with others, like the Method training. He didn't care about being
the best student at drama school;
he wanted to use college to become a professional actor. Half-way
through his third year, he left
school to star in a Dennis Potter television serial, Lipstick
on Your Collar. "I'm so
driven--working madly, and almost arrogantly ambitious,"
he says now. "But I've never known
towards where or what."
On the set of
A Life Less Ordinary, director Danny Boyle is explaining the situation
to a roomful
of extras: "The gentleman in the fetching brown uniform is
Ewan McGregor, who's playing
Robert." Boyle also directed Ewan in Trainspotting and Shallow
Grave, each time in
collaboration with producer Andrew Macdonald and writer John Hodge.
Ordinary has the
creative team's trademark skewed perspective on romance and violence:
Holly Hunter and
Delroy Lindo play angels obstinately determined to make Ewan and
Cameron Diaz's characters
fall in love, sanctioned to use deadly force if necessary.
Many Ordinary
scenes take place in Al's bar, actually an elaborate set just
outside Salt Lake
City, built in what looks like an abandoned basketball arena.
Although I am later told it was the
site of cattle inspections and sales, Ewan has a different theory:
wife auctions. Ewan's acting work
today involves extensive mopping of the bar floor, and denying
authorship of a poem that
Cameron Diaz reads to him. When Ewan says "poem," his
Scottish burr turns the word into a lovely two-syllable song.
As on all film sets, it's slow going, with hours of preparation
for minutes of payoff. These are some of the ways Ewan kills times
between takes: smoking Marlboros, drinking Coca-Cola, singing
Oasis's "Slide Away" (he has a strong, clear voice),
wondering whether any of the booze behind the bar is real, rubbing
Cameron Diaz's shoulders, getting
more hair spray for a look he calls "bullethead." He
scoffs at the notion of staying deep in character, Method-style,
and seems mystified by Delroy Lindo's self-flagellating perfectionism.
"He's quite brilliant," says Ewan, "but after every
single take, he'll be cursing--Godd***it--really angry with himself.
It's quite funny." Then he's called away for a reshoot and
spends the next hour mopping the floor.
Later, Danny
Boyle explains why they didn't
ask Ewan to use an American accent. "We wanted him to play
somebody lost in America,
without any family. And because he's Scottish rather than British,
hopefully you evoke on some
subconscious level Sean Connery rather than Hugh Grant."
I ask Cameron
Diaz about working with Ewan. "All the girls have been coming
up to him and
saying, 'Ewan McGregor, we're in love with you. You're married
and have a baby, it's not fair.'
He has a fun, sophomoric sense of humor--we joke on the set about
having gas. And he makes
acting look so easy: He doesn't beat himself up over it."
Do you beat yourself
up, Cameron?
"Oh, I think
all actors do--except (full Scottish accent) You-wan McGrregorrr!"
As lamented by
Cameron Diaz and who knows how many other women, Ewan is married--to
Eve (pronounced "Ev") Mavarakis, a French production
designer whom he met during a guest
shot on the British courtroom TV drama Kavanagh QC. (Ewan played
a rapist.) He says it was
love at first sight. Their wedding was in July 1995, at a borrowed
villa in rural France, surrounded
by fields full of sunflowers. They threw a weeklong party that
culminated with sixty guests
crowding into the office of the town's mayor, a farmer wearing
a colored sash. The ceremony was
performed in French, which meant that Ewan didn't understand most
of it and that he pledged his
love by saying "Oui." When he did, everybody laughed
and he worried that he had spoken at the
wrong time.
Ewan and Eve's
daughter, Clara Mathilde, was born in February 1996. When dad
is on
location--which is often--mother and daughter come along. During
lunch break on A Life Less
Ordinary, he's the doting father, proudly carrying Clara in his
arms and singing
"depot-depot-doo" to her. Lunch includes corn on the
cob: Ewan takes a bite but doesn't
swallow, letting Clara extract a kernel from between his teeth.
Clara speaks
more French than English. She's a tornado during the day but sleeps
soundly at
night--when she decides that it's bedtime, she dismisses her parents
with a wave and a drowsy
"Au revoir." Ewan's aware that he needs to learn to
parlez-vous the français: "Otherwise in five
years, my daughter will be taking the piss out of me in French
and I won't know what she's talking
about." But he knows asking Eve to teach him is a recipe
for marital unhappiness. He paid so little
attention in school, he doesn't even remember the names for parts
of speech. "You've got to learn
English as well while you're learning French. It's f***ing madness.
I think I know roughly what an
adjective is, but beyond that, I have no idea."
When Ewan first
started going out as a teenager; getting drunk and meeting girls,
Sunday night
used to feel like a physical barrier--the end of the party. He
dreaded it then. Now that he's an
adult with a family, he feels exactly the same way. "I'm
married and have a kid," admits Ewan,
"but I'm certainly not settled down." He's always the
last guy at the party, not wanting it to end,
four hours after his wife's gone home. "I like going out
and she likes staying home," Ewan says.
"So there's some balance there," he says with a laugh.
"Also a lot of arguments."
A few years back,
Ewan made Blue Juice, a surfing movie improbably set in Cornwall,
England,
never released in America. "I had a great time, filming in
Cornwall for ten weeks," he remembers.
"F***in' hell, I've never partied so much in my life. You
should have a look at the film, it's good
laugh. (He pauses, unable to bear the blot on his conscience of
this lie.) I mean, it's a bit muddled
in the middle, it's just a shame, it's not really very good."
He laughs at his sudden confession, then
continues: One Tuesday night, he and a friend were sitting and
talking and drinking in Ewan's
living room, when their driver came in--to join them for a drink,
Ewan thought. Alas, it was
morning and they were due on the set, having completely forgotten
to sleep. Fortunately, Ewan's
low-life character was wearing sunglasses in that day's scene,
so he could stumble his way
through it and hide in dark corners between takes. "It really
doesn't make you feel very clever.
Your acting is absolutely for s**t. So I haven't done it since.
(He pauses again as another blot
looms on his conscience.) He lies!"
Ewan's decided
that hangovers only happen when you admit that you have them.
He's a bit
amazed at what lightwieghts Americans are. Whe he was on location
in Chicago filming his
episode of ER, he would spend some evenings drinking in the hotel
bar: "I'm very, very, very
partial to the margarita, it has to be said." The next day
on the set, people would come up to him
and ask in low tomes if he was okay. Ewan emphasized the his consumption
is not unusual in
Britain: "All my mates drink like bastards. The French drink
for pleasure--we just drink."
Ewan doesn't
need lectures about the ultimate result of guzzling booze: He's
a fan of Richard
Burton. He revels in the stories of the Welsh actor on the set:
No close-ups before 11 a.m.
(Burton would look too haggard) or after 2 p.m. (he'd be too soused).
Bloody Marys before the
first shot. A special post to lean against so he wouldn't lose
his balance when soused. "It's very
sad. No way do I drink like that--I don't drink spirits, necessarily,
and I couldn't handle three or
four bottles a day. But it fascinates me because it's extreme,
and I like extremes."
Ewan now begins
to worry about how his 180-proof tales will read on the page;
he's fascinated
by Burton's vodka-soaked career; but doesn't want to look like
an alcoholic himself. So he
makes light of it by switching into smooth voice-over mode: "At
this point Ewan McGregor
started talking about drink, and his eyes lit up and he got very
excited. Ewan McGregor
condones bottle abuse!"
Ewan extensively researched the part of
Renton in Trainspotting by hanging out with
former addicts, learning about heroin cookery
and recovery. (He didn't ever try heroin
himself, and most of the injections in the movie
were faked. "After a few weeks, I was dying
to be injected," he recalls. "I was saying 'Yes!
Stick it in me!'") Often he can't be bothered
with that background work: "Emma--I didn't
even read the novel. It really bored me to
death. And as a result, my performance is
f***in' dreadful, so there are lessons to be
learned." One suspects that said lessons will
forever remain subordinate to Lesson No. 1,
learned as a Scottish teenager: "Have a good
time, all the time." He doesn't mind prep work
when the research feel fun, like visiting
locations or watching other films. But give him
any assignment that involves reading--even
scripts--and the homework alarm bells start
clanging.
Ewan often plays
characters with one foot in respectable society and the other
foot in crime and
debauchery. In Ewan's world, the trip back and forth between the
office and the underworld, the
dark and the light, is a journey of only a few steps, not a Himalayan
expedition requiring a crew of
Sherpas. So maybe it shouldn't be any surprise that Ewan has as
much enthusiasm for nonstop
work as he does for lager. He speaks fondly of the old studio-system
days, when actors were
under contract and made four films a year. That's the workload
he's settle on for himself. He's
mostly attracted to independent productions and British films;
when he visits Hollywood, he finds
that people there react to the idea of British cinema "as
we would view the psychedelic Polish
movies from the 50's."
The surest way
to get Ewan McGregor to rant is to bring up modern-day Hollywood.
Easy spurs:
the culture of flattery, Independence Day ("an abomination"),,
test scores from previews.
"Nightwatch's producers wanted to reshoot so Ewan's character
would kick more ass; he
refused.) "They all talk about budgets and meetings--the
last thing anybody seems to be worried
about is the movie. A-lists and B-lists of actors--f**k, that's
disgusting. 'We got a B-lister and a
couple of C's, now we need a couple of A's.' No no no no, you
don't. You need the right
person for the part." Ewan's volume rises, as he speaks the
speech of the righteous. "I met an
actress in Los Angeles. She said, 'How long have you been in L.A.?'
I said, 'Well, actually I live
in London.' She said, 'How does that work?' How does that work?"
Ewan's shouting now. "She
couldn't imagine that anyone could make movies outside of L.A."
The one blockbuster
movie that Ewan couldn't refuse was Star Wars, which he considers
a
cultural event, not just a summer thrill ride: "There's nothing
cooler than being a Jedi Knight." The
first Star Wars came out when Ewan was six; he estimates that
he watched it on video
somewhere over a hundred times. Uncle Denis was in all three Star
Wars movies, as Wedge, the
only X-Wing fighter pilot other than Luke to survive the trilogy.
Ewan's currently filming the first of
the three new movies (due in 1999, 2001, and 2003), playing the
young Ben Kenobi, the part
created by Sir Alec Guinness. He's been watching Guinness movies
from the 50's like The Card,
trying to get his young voice down, but hasn't talked to the man
himself: "What would I say?
'How's you do it?' He's only in half the first movie, and it's
a legendary performance. With all that
bad dialogue, he really pulls it off."
So the new Star
Wars dialogue is still awkward?
"There's
some choice lines, yeah. Everything is very deliberate--it's all
about 'We're gonna go do
this now,' as opposed to what you're thinking. So the key is to
just get it out."
Have you ever
talked with George Lucas about it?
"Not really.
What am I going to say? 'George, your dialogues's crap'?"
Periodically,
Ewan gets reminders of the mythic proportions of the project--like
the days he got
to pick out his light-saber handle. "It's the most secretive
thing--I have to sign papers. This guy
looked me in the eye and said, 'Are you ready?' Then he opened
up a briefcase-sized box with
eight or nine light-saber handles. I picked the sexiest one. I
realized, I've been waiting twenty
years to have my own light saber."
What color is
it?
"I can't
tell you that."
One thing Ewan
hasn't pondered in how his life will change in 1999, when he becomes
available
in toy stores worldwide as an action figure. He likes to imagine
that things will be much the same:
He'll be able to walk the streets of London, he won't be hounded
by fans or photographers. This
considerably underestimated the proportions of Star Wars mania.
Not for nothing does Harrison
Ford, another Hollywood hater, live on a ranch in Wyoming. For
Ewan, Difficult choices--not just
about what roles to play, but about when to go out in public--lie
ahead. The contradictions he
breezes by now--damning Hollywood one moment, going for Jedi stardom
the next--are issues
he'll have to work out over the course of his career. He certainly
doesn't want to dwell on it right
now-- that would be like leaving the party before it was over.
If you would like to see Ewan McGregor
naked, you may rent Trainspotting. Or for an
even lengthier view of his uncircumcised penis,
you can turn to The Pillow Book. Ewan's
parents go to all his movies, often bringing a
large group of friends: Their favorites were
Trainspotting and Brassed Off . When The
Pillow Book, full of perversity and nudity, was
released in Scotland, Ewan haltingly told his
father that they might not want to bring guests
to this one. A few days later, Ewan got a fax
from his parents saying that they thought it was
a beautiful film. There was a postscript from
Dad: "P.S. I'm glad to see you've inherited one
of my major assets."
With his rural
upbringing, Ewan is still
impressed by nudity's power to shock, and
that he gets paid, not arrested, when he doffs
his clothes. He recently finished filming Velvet Goldmine (due
in '98), a film about the '70s
glitter-rock scene my Todd Haynes, director of Poison and Safe.
Ewan plays an Iggy Pop-style
rock star. Ewan liked Haynes, but found the film frustrating because
so many scenes were brief
and elliptical. So when he got to improvise the concert sequences,
he cut loose: Dropping his
pants in front of four hundred extras, he waggled his kielbasa
at them, telling them to f**k off.
Clearly, Ewan is not just comfortable with on-screen nudity, he
seeks it out. Maybe even in Star
Wars: "I'm just looking for that moment to drop my Jedi knickers
and pull out my real light
saber."
Ewan loves his
adopted home of London, loves it so much that when he feels lonely
on a movie
set, he comforts himself by reciting London street names out loud.
One bonus of playing
Obi-Wan Kenobi is that much of the Star Wars filming is done in
studios just northwest of the
city. So this afternoon, I'm meeting Ewan at one of his favorite
places on the planet: his local pub.
It's a traditional
British pub, complete with red carpet, dark polished wood, and
vintage Guinness
ads on the wall. There are Christmas lights still up from the
previous year, and a memorial corner
at the bar for the late actor Ronnie Fraser, a former regular.
We order a couple of pints, and then
a couple more, and then talk about Oasis (he's a big fan. When
Be Here Now came out, he
handed out a stack of CDS to people on the Star Wars set. At home,
he listened to it on
headphones, with a large vodka tonic, afraid he might not like
it), the weather (he prefers it as
extreme as possible, whether a blizzard or a sandstorm), and his
degree of computer literacy ("I
can move that wee arrow about a bit").
Ewan's a good
drinking partner: funny, opinionated, friendly. We join a cluster
of locals at the
other end of the bar, watching the end of an England vs. Australia
cricket match. Ewan's one of
the crowd: People ask his questions about Trainspotting, but they
also put handfuls of ice down
the back of his shirt. He contorts theatrically. Ewan tells a
joke about a man with a steering wheel
on his penis, and muffs the punch line. Laughing, unworried, he
tells another: "What do you get
when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Hell's Angel?"
We convey out ignorance. "Someone
who rings your doorbell and tell you to f**k off."
It's Ewan's turn
to buy a round of drinks, but that doesn't stop everybody from
mocking his Jedi
haircut. "They're paying me a lot of money to keep my hair
like this," he protests. Then he pulls
out something surprising that he's kept tucked behind his right
ear: a three-inch lock of hair.
Ewan was supposed
to come to the pub for an hour and then return home; he and Eve
are going
to a friend's birthday party. Now, after two and a half hours
of tippling, he's thinking it might be a
good idea to head home before Eve gets too angry. "I'm blaming
this one on you, mate," he says
to me with a smile, and heads out the door, on his way to the
next party.
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