Fresh off his first Emmy, and finally back helming the galaxy’s biggest sci-fi franchise as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ewan McGregor is embracing life’s second act.
It’s been 17 years since McGregor and George Lucas made the prequels – 1999’s The Phantom Menace, 2002’s Attack of the Clones, 2005’s Revenge of the Sith. If what you remember about them are the bad reviews, worse dialogue, and endless Jar Jar Binks jokes, all I can say is: why, hello there. Over time and across the internet the prequels have been reassessed and – at least among Star Wars fans – become beloved, canon, the source of fan art, animated series, and endless memes. A lot of fans, especially young ones, consider McGregor’s films superior to the more recent sequels (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker), which were plagued by director changes and incoherence. The volte-face even changed how McGregor thinks about the films. “The [prequels] weren’t well received,” he says. “What you hear is usually critic-driven, and everyone was very negative. As it transpires, we were creating the relationship I had with Star Wars when I was a kid with this [younger] generation.”
“I didn’t know,” he adds, “but now I do.”
When McGregor was six, he and his brother were taken to see Star Wars at the cinema because their uncle, Denis Lawson, was playing the rebel pilot Wedge Antilles. “We couldn’t believe it was in our cinema,” he says. “On top of that, it was Star Wars. It must have just blown my tiny mind.” McGregor was born in Perth to a pair of teachers. He moved to London when he was 18 to study drama and got the starring role, four years later, in Channel 4’s Lipstick On Your Collar. Then, in 1996, came Trainspotting. Some people said his performance as Renton was “dry perfection” (The New York Times). Some said he was “the weasled remains of a contemporary Alfie” (The Guardian). Either way, it seemed like Hollywood had found its new leading man.
Has anyone seen everything McGregor? I tried for a month – I might be the first American to watch Blue Juice – but came up short. He’s performed in nearly 100 films and episodes of television. I saw him first when Shallow Grave played in my college town’s local cinema. I saw Trainspotting on a trip to London in 1996. At that point, he was still assuredly Scottish to the audience, but there have been endless roles since with little or no connection to his background – enough to make him seem vaguely international on-screen, unrecognisable from Renton, even rootless. (McGregor became a US citizen in 2016.)
Any back catalogue so big has high and low points. Mainly he’s the lead, occasionally the support. Sometimes he’s excellent and so is the film: Trainspotting and Moulin Rouge!, gems like the Beginners and Last Days in the Desert. One constant is a kind of boyish cheerfulness, a good-humoured faithfulness, whether he’s an object of affection (I Love You Phillip Morris) or an asshole (Down With Love). He can be a terrific villain (Jane Got A Gun, Son Of A Gun), and not just in films with the word “gun” in the title (Birds of Prey, Haywire). Sometimes the film is a clunker (Zoe), or just absurd (A Million Ways To Die in the West), or so stacked with talent (August: Osage County), it’s hard to make an impression. A look through McGregor’s career is a study in what it takes to lift screen acting from passable to great.
“If I’ve ever done anything that didn’t come from a burning need to do that play, that part in that film, then it’s never been my best work,” McGregor says. “Not because I didn’t try harder, or try hard enough. There’s something magical about that: the need to do something. When you read something and you go, ‘this has to be me.’”
The film critic David Thomson has a new book coming out next year called Acting Naturally. He cites McGregor’s voice as one of his top assets as a performer – how, in many roles, it enables him to reinvent himself in a way that breaks free of the British idea, according to Thomson, that your voice identifies you, restrains you. “He would’ve done very well in the ’30s and the ’40s,” Thomson says. “He has a faith in a sort of valiant forthrightness. There’s a lot of optimism in his screen persona. He seems to be having fun in a way a lot of actors don’t seem to these days.”
“I never find the acting of anything hard,” McGregor says. “I have just been doing it a long time, and I trust myself. Before I was even doing it, I was sort of arrogantly self-assured. I’m not like that about lots of things in my life.” He pauses and clutches the back of his neck. “That said, if you were to speak to Mary, two weeks before I started Halston, I was shitting bricks. There’s something about approaching a role – you feel like you’ve got to do it all. So I am both of those things: I’m a nervous wreck, and I’m absolutely self-assured. But I forget before I start filming that I’m self-assured.”
Read the interview in full here.
Image: Ryan Pfluger
