Time Magazine: The Two Faces of Ewan

From fun'n'flirty to down'n'dirty, Britain's most bankable young actor shows off in two very different films
Romantic Moments With Our Leading Man, Scene 1. Ewan McGregor, with one eyebrow arched above a sparkling grin exchanges love-laced one-liners with Renée Zellweger's stubborn (but utterly seduced) feminist author in the new romantic comedy Down With Love. After he tells her he loves her, they share a sweet kiss. Fade out.

Romantic Moments With Our Leading Man, Scene 2. Ewan McGregor, driven by a passionate rage, is smearing ketchup and custard all over Emily Mortimer, who's both terrified and turned on. He forces her onto a grubby kitchen floor, excited by the mix of intimacy, danger and humiliation.

Riding the edge between titillation and abuse, the condiment sex (or is it rape?) scene from Young Adam - the big-buzz, low-budget erotic thriller that opens in most of Europe this week - couldn't be more different from the gauzy fantasia of Down With Love (already out in France, released elsewhere in Europe this week as well). For McGregor, eager to break out of a long run of cute 'n' bland roles, making audiences shift uncomfortably in their seats is precisely the point. The ketchup and custard moment is "quite an awesome scene," he says, chomping on a cookie in a Claridge's Hotel suite in London. "It starts in such a small domestic place, with a lilttle argument, and it ends with such a violent, sexual act. We were all aware it had potential - it felt like a classic movie scene." He's so proud of this dark film that at Cannes he spoke out against the financers who almost withdrew funding for fear it wouldn't earn back their money.

Today, all chatty and smiling, McGregor doesn't seem like a man who's even glimpsed the dark side. But maybe his visit there is the reason he's so happy. After all, Young Adam has a chance to transform him from one of Britain's most bankable young stars - earning $15 million last year alone - into one of Britain's most bankable young actors. After the song-and-dance routine of Moulin Rouge! and the blue-screen make-believe of Star Wars, the lovable rouge in A Life Less Ordinary and the dashing Frank Churchill in Emma, the role of loveless drifter Joe in Young Adam (based on the 1957 novel by Scottish Beat writer Alexander Trocchi) gives him a chance to prove that he's more than a pretty face. It's his first grungy, emotive role since he broke out as everybody's favourite junkie in Trainspotting. And it came just in time. "I learned how much I love that scale of movie," says the 32-year-old Scotsman. "There's very little dialogue, just creating moods and atmospheres, trying to draw the audience into your head, let them see what you're thinking."

It's not so hard to play the bad guy; what's miraculous about McGregor's performance is that he plays a subtly despicable character that audiences can't help liking just a little bit. Amoral, cold and cowardly, his Joe is a far cry from most of McGregor's earlier characters, yet still has some of their animal magnetism. "It's his charm," offers Mortimer. "He has oodles of it, but doesn't rely on it. He just can't help it." That's why director David Mackenzie wanted him for the part. "You need someone like Ewan playing that character, someone who pushes you close to disliking him quite consciously," he says.

McGregor also mines his inner antagonist for his role in Down With Love, but this time it's just for laughs. Part Rock Hudson, part early Sean Connery, he's an angelic cad. Did McGregor see a bit of his slick, skirt-chasing character in himself? He flashes a mischievous smile. "Yeah. I hope so. Not with the womanizing! But I like the zip and the bounce."

No surprise there, as McGregor has been zipping and bouncing all his adult life. After a stint at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he landed a part in the 1993 British TV miniseries Lipstick on Your Collar. "I expected my life to change overnight," he admits. Overnight took three years. Then, in 1996, McGregor landed the role of "Rent boy" Renton, crawling out of a toilet and into hearts in the adrenaline-fueled Trainspotting, which took in more than $64 million worldwide. McGregor was a star; alas, that meant acting like one.

Looking down on his shoes, he remembers his reputation for partying hard and blabbing to reporters. "I used to slag people off. It's kind of a youthful, self-aggrandizing thing to do. It was a stupid thing to do." His targets included fellow actors (of Minnie Driver he used the old line. "She goes to the opening of an envelope") and, naturally, the cutthroat Hollywood biz. But age has taught him that it's not such a good idea to hammer the people he might one day share a frame with or accept a paycheck from. "I've become wiser," he says.

He's happily married now, to French production designer Eve Mavrakis, with two daughters, so the press has to hunt for headlines. "People ask extraordinary things; they basically asked: 'Did you f_____ Nicole Kidman when you made Moulin Rouge?'" he says. "And they feel that they've got the right to. If I went up to someone on the street and asked that, I'd expect a punch in the nose."

McGregor's having too much fun to complain for very long. In January he's in veteran weirdo Tim Burton's Big Fish (about a man trying to learn more about his dying father) and he plays a circus freak for Jodie Foster's Flora Plum, due next year. He's recording a rap tune and giving time to local charities. Earlier this year, viewers of Britain's Channel 4 voted him No. 9 on their list of all-time greatest movie stars - ahead of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. "That's ridiculous," he says. His vote goes to Jimmy Stewart. "There was a charm and a warmth he had that nobody has today," he says. "He played some dark stuff as well. Phenomenal actor." Now that he's played some dark stuff of his own, people are saying the same about Ewan McGregor. And if he keeps making movies that are as different as ketchup and custard, he might one day move to the top of the list.

With reporting by Jeff Chu / London


REVIEW

A Dangerous Charm
One of the nicest and most perplexing aspects of Ewan McGregor's career is that he is not a movie star, at least not in Hollywood's $30-million-opening-weekend understanding of the term. That's perplexing because he has all the goods - looks, charm, chops, range - and because Moulin Rouge!, if not his Obi-Wan Kenobi role in the Star Wars films, should have cued the movie masses to this guy's cinematic charisma. But it's also nice because, unburdened by appearing in one blockbuster after another, McGregor can take on all manner of challenging roles in quirky films.

Both of his current films were inspired by 1950s works - the novel Young Adam, the film Pillow Talk [sic] - but are worlds apart. Down With Love, directed by Peyton Reed, is a riot of pastels and snappy patter; it's often funny in the bright, brittle fashion of the better U.S. sitcoms. But Renée Zellweger, in the Doris Day part, and McGregor, in Rock Hudson's, seem alienated from, even embarrassed by, their roles, particularly when they have to deliver elaborate visual and verbal double entendres. As a result, they make a fatal romantic-comedy error: they try too hard. McGregor seems uneasy playing a brazenly sexist reporter. The role slams its door in his face; he can't get inside it, or doesn't want to.

Young Adam is a grainy, brooding look at working-class urges. McGregor's Joe Taylor screws his way into the hearts of several Glasgow women, leaving them - and he always leaves them - used and abused. As the barge owner played by Tilda Swinton snipes, Joe "can't help lookin' at other women. Even if they're dead." But he is such a charmer that, for the viewer, the ride is always worth it, especially when the smoldering Swinton and the sad beguiler Emily Mortimer are his fellow passengers. (Recipe for a McGregor art film: tart philosophizing, desperate clutches and yards of nudity.)

David MacKenzie's film finds sex in all the wrong places: on the deck of a barge or on a sooty stranded street. This is a gritty, kitchen-sink film with roving bedroom eyes. And the eyes are McGregor's. They bore into the faces of his leading ladies, creating an almost incedent intimacy - a hothouse humidity. Emotionally, erotically, everyone gets drenched.

Pensive and furtive in Young Adam, loopily wolfish in Down With Love, McGregor revels in the freedom to use that wily charm to subersive ends. So maybe conventinal stardom would be a curse. Here's an actor who shouldn't be tied down to a franchise. Not even James Bond - though it's a piquant idea. One smart, sexy Scot playing another.

By Richard Corliss