Ewan McGregor on fame and being able to lead a normal life

TRY and think of the last time you saw Ewan 
McGregor in the gossip columns? Or recall the name of his wife. If you’re shaking your head over either of these questions, that’s just the way McGregor wants it.

He was in Scotland this summer, biking up to Arisaig and catching bands (he’s fanatical about Muse), but his main base is in LA or New York, where he’s less likely to be greeted with a shoutout of “Rents” from Scots when they catch his eye in the street. Off-duty he builds bicycles from scratch, with frames sourced on eBay, and famously he loves small, fast machines, having made several round-the-world trips on his motorbike with longtime pal Charley Boorman. Occasionally, he has a spill.

His latest tumble was just a few blocks from his house, when he came off his £53,000 Indian Larry superbike. “There’s no thought when you’re falling off a bike because there’s no time to think – if you’re lucky. The scary ones are when you do have time to think about it,” he says. “On the TV show I had moments when I knew I was going to come off, but I wasn’t off yet. That meant a horrible moment of thinking, ‘Oh shit, here we go’.”

How has McGregor come through almost two decades of fame relatively unscathed? On a wintry afternoon, his current Edward Lear beard means you might not immediately recognise the lean figure wolfing down a club sandwich as a former icon of Cool Britannia, but when his career took off in that era, he was the first Scots actor to feel the heat of the international limelight since Sean Connery.

Back in those days we used to joke about his drinking (he’s stopped) and his propensity for nude scenes (not so much now, although he doesn’t rule anything out), and he always seemed such a good sport on both these topics that it’s a surprise to find out how much he hated doing press back then. More recently he has developed protective mechanisms so that, while he’s still friendly, lively company, he’s more wary of conversational beartraps. “We seem to be talking a lot about Scotland,” he says pleasantly, when I ask if he was aware of the 2014 countdown when he visited home. “I thought we might talk more about movies.”

That’s fine because The Impossible is something rather special, even though McGregor admits he was reluctant to pick up the script for a film about a family caught up with millions of people in the tsunami of 2004. “It’s a real event where many people lost their lives, which was still very raw for their families. I had to ask myself, ‘Is it right to make a movie about a disaster that really happened where so many lost their lives?’” On the other hand, the story was based on the real experience of one Spanish family whose idyllic holiday with their three young sons was changed by a surging wave that tore them apart.

There’s very little McGregor hasn’t done in movies, except play a father. “I played a dad in Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang,” he amends, although those parenting skills were briefly curtailed soon after the opening credits. However, in reality he’s the father of four girls ranging in age from two to 16. He says he didn’t want to tap into his own experience of raising Clara, Esther, Anouk and Jamiyan to help prepare for the role, partly because he thought it was ethically inappropriate to use them in a horrific tragedy, but also because he says he was afraid “it might devastate me too much to think about being separated from my own children”.

Instead, he drew on his affection for his newly-created film family to prepare for the role. Having worked with Naomi Watts before, he had no difficulty bonding with his screen wife, and the film family of three boys: Tom Holland, Oaklee Pendergast and Samuel Joslin. “I used to take pictures of me and the boys, and send them to Eve and my girls back home, saying, ‘This is my secret family in Thailand’.”

It must have been interesting being the father of boys for a change? “Well, there’s more sport, and it’s much more physically demanding. Back home, there’s more emotional drama, which makes it the perfect house for an actor.” His children aren’t that impressed by his line of work, he admits. The 
eldest has already decided she’d rather be a photographer, and he claims he gets no respect for playing Obi Wan Kenobi. “I have never heard them say, ‘Daddy, can you put on the Star Wars film’,” he observes dryly.

Only Tom Holland, McGregor’s oldest screen son, was a stage veteran, with two years of playing Billy Elliott under his belt; the younger two boys had never acted before, although they knew who McGregor was. “I saw them freeze because it was Obi Wan Kenobi walking into the room. And at that point you think, ‘Well OK, we’ve got to get past that.’ But it was done really carefully. I would never play tricks with them like frightening them for a take, because they were lovely, amazing little boys.”

The script evolved out of hours of meetings with the Belton family and the result is viscerally wrenching yet compelling – in particular one scene where an emotionally threadbare McGregor barely holds up one half of a phone conversation where he has to break the news of his lost family to his 
father-in-law.

“Sometimes the big emotional scenes are pretty straightforward because you know what you have to reach but there was a lot of expectation here. It’s like when I did Young Adam, where I pour custard on Emily Mortimer and we have sex. That was the scene everyone was talking about in 
costume fittings or make-up tests. So the scene where I make the phone call and break down was like that. You feel the weight of it.” He grins. “And if someone used the word 
‘pivotal’ just before filming, you know you’re f***ed.”

The director, Juan Antonio Bayona, had sourced real 
tsunami survivors for the scene to help ground the sequence, “but there were also about 350 holidaymakers playing extras who had found flyers in bars saying, ‘Be in a Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor film, turn up at the bus station at 7 o’clock.’ So as we walked up to shoot the scene, I could hear 300 people going, ‘There he is look, look.’ So it wasn’t easy.” At 41, McGregor is now part of a new conversation, as a potential Oscar nominee. He has already been nominated for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen as Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes next month, but famous friends are convinced The Impossible will bring him real recognition when it opens. Stanley 
Tucci has described his performance as “one of the best I have seen in a very long time”. Angelina 
Jolie went further, hosting a preview of the film at a 
London hotel and making headlines by declaring it made Brad Pitt cry. “I’m so grateful to Angelina 
because she did that out of the goodness of her heart,” says McGregor. “She just saw the film and liked it.”

Along with the buzz around The Impossible, McGregor is back in the news following Disney’s announcement of a deal to produce three more Star Wars films from 2015. He hasn’t waved a lightsabre in seven years, but there’s wishful thinking that he may return in Star Wars VII. “I knew about the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney because they let me know the night before it was announced, but I haven’t been asked and I’m not sure they’d need me. I don’t know what the stories are, or if they’ve even been written. In fact, you probably know more about it than me.”

Would he like to reprise the role? “Yeah, sure,” he says neutrally, because he’s been answering this one all week. “Playing Obi Wan Kenobi is a great thrill, so if they need me then I’m happy to do it. Besides, Alec Guinness isn’t available.”

McGregor’s first links to Star Wars were familial. Uncle Denis was in all three movies, as Wedge, the only X-Wing fighter pilot other than Luke to survive the trilogy, and the original 1977 blockbuster was one of the first films McGregor saw in a cinema. “My brother Colin and I were picked up from school and taken to see it. We’d never seen my uncle on a big screen before, so it was pretty full on.”

From an early age, McGregor wanted to follow in his uncle’s footsteps. He 
attended Morrison’s Academy in 
Crieff but left at 16 to work at Perth Rep and take a one-year acting course in Kirkcaldy. “When I was trying to get into drama school, my uncle worked on my audition speeches with me. And when I left drama school early for my first job, I went round to his house and he gave me a technical masterclass. So when I went on set the next day for Lipstick On Your Collar, I knew what to expect.”

Ironically, when the chance arose to play a younger version of Alec Guinness’ jedi master, the first thing Lawson did was try to talk him out of it. “He said to me, ‘If you want to have a career after 30, don’t do it.’” He flashes another open-jawed grin. “And I paid no attention.”

That’s not entirely true. “It was a big decision and the worry was that I might not survive a film with that kind of hype, but I did three auditions and the nearer I got to it, the more I wanted to do it.”

Three films later, he has heard every possible jokey variation of ‘May the Force be with you’. But he can still identify with the excitement caused by the elaborate galactic saga. “Just before I got the job, George Lucas showed me the studios and they were building this huge submarine. I got excited and asked, ‘Will we be going underwater in that?’ He looked at me as if I was nuts and said, ‘You know, none of it is real.’ And sadly that’s part of the experience. You get behind the curtain.”

It’s hard to think of many movie stars who have had the sort of career McGregor has had – long, prolific, wide-ranging – yet have not received an Oscar nomination. Since his breakout in 1996’s Trainspotting, McGregor’s work has favoured the indie and the quirky – think Velvet Goldmine, The Ghost, The Men Who Stare at Goats and I Love You Phillip Morris. And yet he could have had a big American career if he had wanted it. But he doesn’t. “I’ve never been drawn to mainstream macho roles,” he says. “I can’t do that sort of big acting, and they don’t feel like real people to me.”

We try to tot up the number of films he’s made. My sums add up to 49, but McGregor thinks he‘s gone way past that and wants a recount. Eventually, we give up, so let’s just say he has a large and varied CV. There have been some dodged bullets along the way too; he admits to meeting Madonna to talk about playing Edward VIII in WE. “We never got any further than talking about it. But it was nice to meet her.”

He has no regrets about the films he has made, with the exception of Emma, where he appears 
shaggy haired and on horseback opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1996 Austen adaptation. “There’s nothing wrong with the film,” he says, “but I’m terrible in it.” On the other hand, he has a particular soft spot for 
the epically romantic musical Moulin Rouge. The 
McGregor children don’t watch his films, but Clara found it while channel hopping and was in floods of tears. “Shall I turn it off then?” he teased her. “Nooooo,” she replied.

Next year he has three more films in the pipeline, including the rom-com Born To be King, directed by Peter Capaldi, but screen acting has become an 
increasingly precarious, hard-nosed business, even for the likes of McGregor. He was crushed that the pilot for his first TV drama The Corrections didn’t get commissioned into a series earlier this year. It could have been compelling TV, and McGregor had 
mentally blocked off several months for filming. 
Instead, he spent the summer in France and Scotland, on his first extended break. He joined the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, and says 12 days watching other people’s films renewed his faith in modern film 
making.

“I’d thought we were going downhill fast. I thought the studio’s knee-jerk reaction was to make fewer films, and only movies they felt could make their money back, like fairy tales or vampire films. At Cannes, I was totally turned around. Films like Argo and Silver Linings Playbook are really interesting and continue to push the envelope. It’s more difficult now than it was three or four year ago to balance your career with financial obligations to put children through school or college – but the good stuff is still there.”

Twitter: @SiobhanSynnot

The Impossible is released on Tuesday