Vanity Fair, December 1998 - Part 1
A Star's WarsAfter 10 movies, including Trainspotting and this month's Velvet Goldmine, Ewan McGregor looks like the biggest actor to come out of Scotland since Sean Connery. In the comically unshowbiz surroundings of McGregor's cramped London home and grimly local pub, Zoë Heller gets an earful about how the 27-year-old star reconciles his disdain for Hollywood with his next role, in George Lucas's raptly awaited Star Wars prequel
Tonight, in Ewan McGregor's local pub - a down-at-the-heels establishment in Belsize Park, north London - a crowd of roaring men has taken over the bar to watch a soccer game on television. Finding his usual spot usurped, McGregor has retired to a corner table with a couple of his friends, where he is now making swift work of his fifth pint of the day and bemoaning the revolting state of the pub's lavatories. "Jesus" he exclaims in his slightly Londonized Scottish burr. "You'd think they could afford to shell out 20 quid to clean it up a bit in there. Get a lavatory seat or something! I mean... give me 20 quid and I'll clean it up." Notes are duly compared on the hygiene deficiencies of the men's room. "Yeah," someone says, "people throw coins into the urinal. It's like the frigging Trevi Fountain." "And imagine," McGregor says, warming to his gruesome theme, "imagine being the guy who has the job of clearing the coins out? Eeeeuw!" The conversation moves on. One of McGregor's friends describes falling down the stairs the other night, after a particularly hard drinking bout. "Yeah, I damaged me coccyx," he says. "And that was the end of the tale. Ha! Me coccyx. End of the tale." McGregor bangs the table and lets out a great howl of mirth, whereupon the pub landlord, a rather sour-faced Irishman, approaches. "Oy," he shouts at McGregor. "Keep it down." McGregor nods mildly and returns to his pint. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Great White Hope of British film. He may look like the sort of shiftless youth you see lolling around the escalators in shopping malls, but this 27-year-old-with a vaguely 70s shag and a cigarette dangling from his lips - is being hailed as the biggest thing to come out of Scotland since Sean Connery. "When I first started thinking about my movie, he was the one actor I knew I wanted to use from the start. There's no one else with Ewan's sort of intensity around," Todd Haynes, the director of McGregor's latest, Velvet Goldmine. "Ewan has an incredible, raw power onscreen that I don't think you find among American actors of his generation." Like many people, Haynes was introduced to McGregor by the 1996 movie Trainspotting, an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's novel about Scottish heroin addicts, directed by British director Danny Boyle. As the wild-eyed junkie, McGregor gave an astonishing performance - a speedball of scruffy sexual charm and manic energy that managed to inject the weary concept of "the lovable rouge" with a peculiarly 90s vigor. "Every now and then," says Boyle, "you come across someone who's a sort of spokesperson for a particular era, someone who sums up a particular feeling or mood. Well, Ewan is one of those people. He is such a contrast to the kind of naked ambition and hardness of the 80s. He is perfect for this time." Trainspotting, which became something of a cult phenomenon in Britain, not only earned McGregor hero status among British and American twentysomethings; it also made casting directors around the world take note. And phone Hollywood. This spring, McGregor stars as the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first episode of George Lucas's long -awaited Star Wars prequel - a role that is rather more wholesome, and a great deal more lucrative, than those to which he has been hitherto accustomed. His British agent, Lindy King, sums up the financial leapfrog thus: "For Trainspotting Ewan got next to nothing. for Velvet Goldmine he got 10 times that. And for Star Wars - well, he'll get 10 times that again." For now, however, the actor's life remains so absent of showbiz perks as to be almost comical. The fourth lead on a WB sitcom has a ritzier time of it than McGregor. At his gloomy basement apartment, around the corner from the pub, the telephone has just been cut off. (His wife forgot to pay the bill.) Ragged cardboard boxes overflow with knickknacks and books that the cluttered rooms cannot otherwise accommodate. (Several more boxes are being stored down the road in the cellar of the obliging local deli owner.) McGregor has bought a house in a more salubrious area of north London, but he has been waiting more than a year for it to be renovated. "I don't seem to be able to get anyone in to move bricks," he says in an exasperated tone. "It's driving me fucking mad." Earlier in the day, when I went to his apartment to pick him up, he was crouching in the narrow hallway, fielding the calls that had started coming in on the fax-machine phone - occasionally squishing himself against the wall to allow his two-and-a-half-year daughter, Clara, to get by to the kitchen. In the living room, McGregor's wife Eve, a tiny waif of a Frenchwoman in jeans and running shoes, was just finishing off some ironing before settling down - inspired by the telephone disaster - to tackle a tottering pile of other unpaid bills. Ah, the lives of white-hot British stars and the women who love them. "You know how swimming naked is such a lovely feeling? Well, being naked on set is kind of a bit like that. It makes you feel powerful, I suppose." In a polite little restaurant in Primrose Hill, over a bottle of white wine and a plate of liver and mashed potatoes, McGregor is discussing Velvet Goldmine, a phantasmagoric eulogy to the glam-rock era in which he plays Curt Wild, a drug-blurred 70s rock singer, based to a large extent on the real-life icon Iggy Pop. McGregor manages, in the course of his performance, to share rather more of his physical self with the audience than is generally expected from legitimate actors. This is not a first. His propensity for appearing in uninhibited nude scenes - most notably in Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book - has been the source of much amused chatter in Britain for a while now. (One magazine profile of the actor ran with the headline I DO HAVE A VERY LARGE PENIS.) "It does get written about a lot," McGregor says, sighing. "Let's try and do it in a new way. How about I show it to you right now? 'At this point, Ewan slopped his cock into the mashed potato.'" He laughs uproariously. In preparation for his Velvet Goldmine role, McGregor spent a lot of time studying tapes of Iggy Pop, in order to capture something of the man's id-in-excelsis stage presence. Having seen the film twice, he feels pretty confident that he did a good job. "When I saw the movie at the Edinburgh International Film Festival... I was truly shocked. I was like 'Look what I'm doing. Look what I'm doing.' I was truly exhilarated by watching myself. Does that sound arrogant? It's because I wasn't in control of myself when I was doing it." In perhaps the most memorable scene of the movie, McGregor appears at an open-air concert before a large, disenchanted crowd and proceeds to stir them into a hostile fury with a decadent show that features stage-diving, spitting, large amounts of glitter and oil, and generous exposure of his genitalia. If this sounds rather revolting, it is - while also managing to be exciting, funny, and quite sexy. McGregor makes a frightening charismatic rock star. "That was the heart of my performance," says McGregor fondly. "That's what the whole film will always be about for me... The thing is, I enjoy extraordinary situations... I thrive on excess in lots of respects. When I was standing onstage at four in the morning in front of 400 extras - drunk, pulling my penis, bending over and showing them my arsehole - that was an extraordinary situation to find myself in. I got such a buzz out of it... The first time I did a take, I turned around at the end and everyone - the crew, the extras - was literally speechless. It was a great moment. Nobody had anything to say." In addition to making us familiar with all of McGregor's bit, Velvet Goldmine also gives us the actor in the throes of gay sex. Together with nudity, a permissive, polymorphous sort of libidinousness has been a regular characteristic of McGregor's film roles thus far. One of his interesting and peculiarly modern talents is his capacity for communicating a sexuality that is distinctively male yet devoid of machismo. "Ewan was very cool about the sex scenes," director Todd Haynes says. "I'm not sure an American actor of his age would have been so relaxed. Americans tend to get worried about portraying gay characters - how it will affect their careers. When they do sex scenes, they tend to leap up as soon as you say 'Cut' and start punching walls and joking around with the crew, to reassert their masculinity. Ewan wasn't like that at all... When he was doing scenes with Christian [Bale], the two of them would stay in an embrace between takes, and continue to be tender to one another, shutting out the crew. I felt incredible admiration for how secure about their sexuality they were." "It's actually much more exciting being in a sex scene with a man," McGregor says. "It's something outside of my normal experience. It's another example of an extreme situation - snogging a man." McGregor, it may be ventured, is a surprising person to find defending George Lucas's Empire in a Star Wars movie. It is not just that he is waggling his willy and snogging men on a screen near you this winter. There is also the fact that, to date, his prodigious work record has been restricted largely to small, or teeny, independent, European productions. Nightwatch a thriller in which he appeared earlier this year, with Nick Nolte and Patricia Arquette, is the one major exception, and the mere mention of that film prompts him to let out a low yowl of horror. McGregor chose to spend this year on the following projects: Little Voice - a small British film directed by Mark Herman, based on the play The Rise and the Fall of Little Voice. McGregor's part as a nerdy adolescent pigeon-fancier was minuscule, but he took it "because I'd never played anyone like that before." Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs - a fringe production of David Halliwell's 1960's play, directed by the actor Denis Lawson, McGregor's uncle. The Eclair - a surrealist six-minute short, made by a friend of his, in two days, on a Scottish beach. The director Danny Boyle, along with the writer John Hodge and the producer Andrew MacDonald, has made three films with McGregor thus far - Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and A Life Less Ordinary. Boyle has spoken in the past of finding it "frustrating" to see McGregor spreading himself so thin, with so many small projects. But McGregor is dismissive. "I think maybe they were worried in case I was in anything crap, because they thought it would reflect badly on them." "Ewan wants to grow as an actor," says Lindy King, who has presided over McGregor's unorthodox career choices. "Actors don't really do repertory theater anymore - so Ewan has been using the last couple of years as his own repertory experience on-screen." Part 2 of the Interview |
