He’s the eternal optimist, the affable family man who happens to be a sex-god superstar. Yet still he doesn’t feel loved. He spoke to Miranda Sawyer
Ewan McGregor is one of the most extraordinary people you could ever meet; but what is startling about him is his delightful, dumbfounding ordinariness. His freakish normality. Richard E Grant noticed it when he worked with him on The Serpent’s Kiss. He called McGregor “astonishingly grounded – considering the career tornado around him, it’s amazing his head doesn’t turn around 360”.
A (non-famous) friend of mine who appears with McGregor in his latest film, Velvet Goldmine, says: “Ewan’s just not like a celebrity. You don’t feel like you have to be witty or interesting all the time when you’re with him.”
Certainly, I’ve never interviewed anyone like him. When you interview famous people, there is an unspoken hierarchy. The star is the one with the interesting talent/opinions/life, the star is the point. You don’t talk about yourself at all. You allow the star to waffle on about stuff that they think gives them credibility (tough background, art-type projects, ouch-my-foot name-dropping of clubs/designers/drugs). Interviews with famous people are not conversation between equals.
But McGregor meets you on absolutely level terms. He doesn’t travel with an entourage, he’s not shepherded by PRs. He doesn’t flirt, he doesn’t show off, he isn’t cool (he loved Oasis’s third LP when the world was backlashing). He lacks a single smidgen of the expensive sheen that usually lacquers over the successful. He looks you in the eye and guffaws at jokes. There is no side to him. He’s not being nice to impress, either: I saw him treat a caf waitress in the same easy, friendly manner. Maybe he has less time than you, but that’s no surprise. Anyhow, if you meet him after lunch, he often manages to extend things over a few drinks.
Actually, read his press cuttings and you’d think he was never out of the pub. He told The Face that “it’s just a state of being for me. I’m just usually drunk”, and before I met him, I’d seen him quite trashed, out around London, in everyday pubs and members-only bars, at film premieres and comedians’ parties.
But at the moment McGregor is sober. It’s 7pm and we’re talking on the telephone. We’re meant to be discussing Velvet Goldmine, but the conversation (that strange word again) has moved about a bit, and right now, McGregor is informing me that he uses tongue when he snogs on film – “every time!” (I’d heard that some actors just open their mouths and squirm their lips about.) He’s too diplomatic to say which of his many devastating leading ladies has been the best kisser, but “the bloke in The Pillow Book” was the best of the chaps.
Our chat moves on again, and soon McGregor is trumpeting in his enthusiastic, yet oddly soothing, tones about the Scots – “I love Scotland and I love Scottish people. They’re very emotional people, we’re always crying up there, usually because we’re happy. Or drunk.” Then the Spice Girls (he likes Sporty: “nice bod”): then Leonardo DiCaprio.
Lovely Leo has been cast as the lead in The Beach, which will be the fourth film from the alliance of Danny Boyle, Andrew MacDonald and John Hodge, makers of Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary. McGregor starred in all three: the first two made his name (along with the Boyle team’s). Which makes it all the more surprising that he will not be starring in Boyle et al’s fourth effort. Especially as, last year, McGregor told me he was getting excited about doing The Beach. Now he says he’s “gutted” that he’s not in it.
Why aren’t you?
“Och … it was all getting rather expensive and they would get more money for the budget if they cast Leonardo,” mopes McGregor. “But don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely not a feud between me and them or anything. I was sad to miss out, partly because it’ll be a good film, but mostly because I love working with them.”
There’s a pause, then McGregor brightens and starts chatting about his motorbikes.
I first met McGregor in October 1997, in Scarborough, where he was filming Little Voice with Jane Horrocks. We walked to a caf for a late breakfast. McGregor was mildly hungover from the previous night. Afew hours later, we strode past the bright tat of the souvenir shops, past young mothers and a gaggle of skiving teenagers, towards his sausage and egg. No one asked for his autograph. I pointed this out.
“See! Not famous!” he laughed. “Anyway, when I do get asked for autographs, people are kind of unsure: ‘Are you sure you’re him? Ewan McGregor’s really thin. You’re too fat and unattractive.'”
What he meant by “fat and unattractive” is that he doesn’t look like he did when he played Renton in Trainspotting. Renton, shaven-headed, skinny, two stone lighter than the McGregor of now, was heroin chic to a scummy tee and a chap who got the ladies going.
I know of one woman who used Renton as motivation when she went for her early- morning swim – she kept thinking of him, just out of reach; I know of several sophisticates in their 30s who asked me if I knew where he went out, or whether he had a girlfriend, or if I could get hold of a big poster, anything.
When you meet McGregor, he’s not like that. He’s fat and unattractive.
Only joking. He’s a handsome, scruffy bloke, in skate shoes, army-type trousers and enormo-anorak. He has a rubbish spiky haircut and pasty skin; clear eyes; blob nose; lovely voice; big, infectious laugh. He’s like your bumptious younger brother. Sorry, girls.
We talk about his performance as Curt Wild in Velvet Goldmine. The film is a glassy- eyed fantasy based on the glam-rock era of the 1970s. It’s not a documentary, though there are several characters who are clearly based on real people: Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is like David Bowie; McGregor’s character resembles Iggy Pop. This means McGregor gets to bleach his hair blond, take all his clothes off on stage and waggle his willy at 200 screaming extras: “It was written in that I was just going to moon at them, but I’d been doing some research into Iggy Pop, into what an outrageous character he was, and I was absolutely smashed – so it all came out. So to speak.”
As it happens, the friend of mine who has a small but important character in the film, said of McGregor’s pop performance: “On- stage, you realised just how much he’s worth. There was a stunt man, but Ewan wouldn’t use him. He dived through a wall of fire, he writhed around naked, he did all the singing himself. He didn’t have to, he just got up there and did it. He has a lot of, erm, raw male energy.”
But not an awful lot of singing talent. There is a classic scene where Curt Wild is in the studio, singing rawly, malely, energetically, craply (to be fair, he is meant to be bad). “I thought it was good that I sang!” howls Ewan, defensively. “It was a brilliant idea.”
Would you like to be a rock star?
“No. I’d be dead. I find it hard enough to stop myself now … The relentless touring, the buggering about, the endless parties, the fuelled consumption from the endless parties, performing in front of thousands of people … If I did that for more than a week, I’d sink into a terrible depression. We have rock stars for a reason – we need them to do it for us.”
McGregor is still miffed by the notion that he can’t sing, “I was quite musical at school. I’ve got French horn to Grade 7, I did a couple of concertos, and I played in the school pipe band as a side drummer. I won the drumming cup!”
OK, OK. Other McGregor musical credentials: he had his own rock band when he was 15, called Scarlet Pride. He had a couple of lacy-glove era Madonna calendars, “but I used to keep them under the bed. They’d only come out on special occasions. I used to masturbate like a lunatic, but only over Madonna, for some reason. Can you imagine if I met her now? So many secrets …”
Brought up in rural, conservative Crieff, near Perth, the younger son of Jim, a PE teacher, and Carol, a special needs teacher: both recently retired. His elder brother Colin – head boy, sporty, academic, more conventionally promising than McGregor – is now a pilot in the Royal Airforce.
McGregor thinks Colin is like his dad, but he is like his mum. She does “audio- describing”, where she sits at the back of a theatre and describes the set and action for visually impaired people over headphones.
“It’s an amazing skill, to fit it in between the dialogue,” says McGregor, proudly. “If he pulls a gun out of his pocket, you’ve got to say: ‘He pulls the gun out of his pocket’ in between the ‘You bastard, I’m going to kill you’ and the ‘No don’t kill me’. She’s trying to do videos now, she wants to do Trainspotting. You can imagine it, can’t you? ‘He rams a needle into his arm and collapses backwards on to the floor. Oh, son!'”
And what of McGregor’s own little family? He met his wife Eve, who’s French and a production designer, on a television set in January 1994, when he was 22. They were married just over a year later; Clara, their little girl, is now two-and-a-half. Usually, Eve and Clara accompany McGregor wherever he’s filming, but not always, and in February 1997, when McGregor was in Los Angeles working on the Quentin Tarantino- directed episode of ER, Clara got meningitis. McGregor and Eve were both very frightened: it affected their marriage. McGregor has spent this summer making things right with Eve. “We have had a lot of talking to do,” he told Harper’s& Queen.
McGregor tells me he’s pleased to be back in London, working but living at home. He’s glad not to be on a movie set. “I’m not bored of acting but I got tired of films. I stopped for a bit because I wasn’t bounding on to the set in the mornings any more.”
He is soon to make his directing debut, a film for Sky TV made up of 10 stories, all set on the London underground. Other directors include Jarvis Cocker, the writer Armando Iannucci, and the actor Jude Law. McGregor’s piece is about searching for a lost love. It wasn’t his idea: he was asked to do it.
McGregor is a chap who finds it hard to say no: “Someone says, ‘What about this?’ and I just go, ‘Oh, OK.'” Airily dismissive of Hollywood blockbusters (except Star Wars), he finds it impossible to turn down friends, which is why he returns to the same directors and writers (the Trainspotting team; Mark Herman, who wrote Brassed Off and Little Voice). And it means that, in between films, he ends up doing voice-overs for advertisements, and airline safety videos, taking daft parts in short films, forming a production company.
It’s this same appeasing trait that leads him into bumper packs-worth of press. “Actually, interviews can make me feel insecure,” he admits. “People feel they have the right to ask you absolutely anything. They say, ‘How do you show your romantic side to your wife?’ and I say, ‘Absolutely none of your fucking business,’ and they get annoyed. It freaks you out. You start thinking, ‘Is my family life really secure, like I think it is?”
In the background, over the phone, I can hear Eve and Clara. “I’ve got to go now,” murmurs McGregor, happily. “I’ve got to put my daughter to bed.”