- guardian.co.uk, Saturday October 4 1997 17.03 BST
An empty village pub in Galway, one of seven available to only 3,000 inhabitants and us. As a doormat hung on the wall confirms, it's 'lovely weather for ducks', so Ewan McGregor and I are stuck inside playing pool. Just when I had come to the conclusion that McGregor's life couldn't get any better - that his luck (if you can call it luck) couldn't get any luckier - I can only stand and watch as the black ball he has just mis-hit meanders around the table, kisses the last stripe and plops gently into its designated pocket. Game to Ewan McGregor: the man who can do no wrong. He flashes one of those characteristically cocky, charismatic grins, finishes his Guinness, and saunters to the bar, accepting such fortune as his due.
I should have known. Just five years ago he was still at drama school. He landed his first speak- ing role as soon as he left (in Channel 4's 1992 Dennis Potter series, Lipstick On Your Collar). And in the five years since then, McGregor has been on a roll.
He followed Lipstick with assured, eye-grabbing leads in Shallow Grave, Blue Juice and the BBC costume drama, Scarlet And Black, before Trainspotting ensured that this star was going intergalactic. McGregor has become the only young British star who can open a film in this country, having spent just four months on the dole and with only three bit-parts: in Potter's Karaoke, Bill Forsyth's Being Human and Kavanagh QC - and even those were quality, popular productions.
Anyone who thought McGregor couldn't get any hipper than Trainspotting underestimated him. He took the starring role in the hostage episode of ER (for which he was nominated for an Emmy), followed that with A Life Less Ordinary, the new film from the Trainspotting team, and now, knocking everything he's done so far into a comparatively small cocked hat, second lead in the new Star Wars films.
Trainspotting was that rare thing: a phenome-non that went from commenting on the zeitgeist, to actually shaping it. It launched the actor on such a colossal wave of controversy, publicity and popularity that he has been billed as 'Britain's next big superstar' and 'the British Brad Pitt'. But, rather than being weighed down by too much expectation, McGregor has gone from strength to strength, making the supposedly elusive process of star-making look straightforward.
McGregor made his name as an out-of-control junkie in Trainspotting, and fitted comfortably into a range of other roles. He did an art-house movie (Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book), a successful - and almost credible - period piece (Gwynneth Paltrow's Emma), a gritty British comedy (Brassed Off) and a modern Hollywood thriller (Nightwatch, with Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette). This year, he's just kept on going.
'No,' he laughs. 'I keep saying I'm not going to work for two months and then someone says, 'What about this?' and I just go, 'Oh, okay.' Starring roles in The Serpent's Kiss - described as 'a sensual period thriller' - and Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine, as a glam-rock star in the early Seventies, have already been completed; next month sees the release of A Life Less Ordinary, by producer Andrew Macdonald, scriptwriter John Hodge and director Danny Boyle. He has also agreed to play the leads in biopics of James Joyce ('a really dirty, sexy, script' titled Nora) and Nick Leeson (Rogue Trader). Then there's the piddling matter of Star Wars. McGregor will be playing the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (originally played by Sir Alec Guinness) in George Lucas's trilogy of prequels. That's all three of them - truly, some kind of roll.
Plus - if we really want to torment ourselves - there is plenty more. He frequently tops magazine polls in categories such as The 100 Most Creative People In Entertainment (Entertainment Weekly), or Britain's most fashionable/fanciable celebrity, whatever.
Just 26, a lucky Aries, McGregor is happily married, and has already racked up a formidable number of love scenes with beautiful co-stars from Lipstick On Your Collar's Louise Germaine to Trainspotting's Kelly MacDonald, making out with Vivian Wu, Greta Scacchi, Tara Fitzgerald and Catherine Zeta Jones along the way.
When we first met, just before filming started on A Life Less Ordinary, he struggled to recall the name of his latest love interest, fumbling through 'Carmen Somebody' and 'Caron Something-Or-Other' before arriving at Cameron Diaz, Hollywood's hottest starlet. 'Er, yes,' he grins, with his typical brand of shyness tinged with cheek, 'I've been fortunate to work with some very talented actresses.'
McGregor has done so many nude scenes (especially in The Pillow Book) that for a while it looked as if he was on some sort of mission to become the Harvey Keitel of his generation - so much so that one magazine titled a profile of him 'I do have a very large penis'. It really does seem like Ewan McGregor will become the first proper young British movie star for years. Lads like him, ladies like him (from teenage girls to little old ladies in the snug), and the camera absolutely loves him. All of which sets him apart from other British candidates over the years.
For all their success in the States, Tim Roth and Gary Oldman were too grubby and intense to make the grade as the hero in a film as big as Star Wars. Good actors such as David Thewlis, Kenneth Branagh, Jeremy Irons or Daniel Day-Lewis never had a following as young or as hip as McGregor. Candidates such as Rupert Everett or Rupert Graves never had the actual ability (the part that everybody forgets about). Julian Sands never had the chance.
Watching him flick through the options on the jukebox, it occurs to me I should ask him his Lottery numbers. (He has, in fact, placed a bet at the bar on which square of a grid will receive Daisy the cow's first cowpat.) As he puts on a song, I try not to expect anything too significant or revealing. The last song he put on was 'Oh-oh Black Betty/bamba-lam'. If he had any decency, he'd just come clean and select something like Joe Walsh's Life's Been Good To Me So Far or Kylie Minogue's I Should Be So Lucky. Never one to disappoint, sure enough the jukebox clicks on to his next choice. And to the strains of Bob Marley's Don't Worry 'Bout A Thing, Ewan McGregor beams and carries on playing pool.
Several months later, the significance of his role in Star Wars is finally sinking in. Having always seemed naturally genial and good-humoured, for the first time he appears tense, more put-upon and so consummately professional about the interview that he is in danger of becoming anodyne.
He's acknowledged before that this can happen, remarking that after doing months of publicity for Trainspotting and hundreds and hundreds of interviews, 'you find a story that was once just so-so suddenly becomes incredibly fucking interesting and funny'. Whereas a year ago, he was still claiming 'I've no idea what 'cracking Hollywood' means', the combination of Star Wars, ER and Cameron Diaz must have given him a pretty good idea. The last time I saw him, after the day's filming was finishing, the producers were putting him in a helicopter to go to an Oasis gig.
Having got this far while still managing to be an 'ordinary', down-to-earth young man with everything going his way, he now gives you a sense that he's beginning to wonder if his life will have many ordinary moments left. Playing pool in Galway, McGregor was still deriding, with scoffing Scottish sarcasm, the idea of being part of 'the Groucho Club scene'.
A year on, here he is doing an interview there, though admittedly not as a member. When I refer teasingly to the 'real Ewan McGregor', he counters darkly with reference to 'the magazine me'. Whereas he never read magazines when he was growing up, he says he 'quite likes them now 'cause you occasionally see your mates in them'.
These days, even his most ordinary-looking moments (playing pool, drinking Guinness, loitering around Soho) are simply fodder for photo shoots. In pictures of McGregor lying around his room looking coolly scruffy and fashionable, the clothes are invariably provided by a stylist. He admits he has recently, for the first time, felt anxious about travelling on the Underground. The notion that someone might shout 'It's Ewan McGregor!' and mayhem ensue is enough to make him think maybe it would be simpler just to get a cab.
Even if he hasn't really changed, the perception is that he has. When the Star Wars role was announced, one hack who was denied an interview attributed McGregor's success to the fact he was 'addicted to fame'. 'No, I'm not!' he scoffs, affronted. 'That's so shite.' In fact, his luvvie side insists 'all that interests me is making good movies. Bigger directors are not necessarily better directors. I want to do the sort of movies I've been doing over here.' (He has his own production company, along with Jonny Lee Miller and Jude Law, and they are planning to do The Hellfire Club together.) He is bewildered, and outraged, by the number of times he has been branded in the press as a 'ligger' or some sort of product of Brit Pop, and is duly dismayed to learn that one friend of mine dismissed him as being 'too fashionable': a victim of endless profiles in i-D, The Face or Arena, posing in other people's clothes - the latest of which, he spits, 'makes me look like a cunt'.
Of course, with Danny Boyle's Dollars 12-million A Life Less Ordinary still to come, not to mention Star Wars, McGregor's fame is set to escalate to another level entirely.
He has been watching the three Star Wars films and studying Alec Guinness ('trying to get that down, get the voice right') so intently that he doesn't think he can sit through them any more.
While Hollywood was probably teeming with actors and agents making a play for a part in Star Wars, McGregor simply met the casting agent, did a screen-test and met director George Lucas, which in itself must have been pretty intimidating.
'George Lucas was very relaxed, very calm. He didn't make it a big deal - it probably wasn't a big deal to him. I did three scenes with Liam Neeson. That was really scary,' he beams with real enthusiasm, the sort of eager glee that makes him suddenly seem incredibly young. 'I was more nervous for that than I have been for a long time. Sitting there feeling really scared again. It was great.' He went home thinking he couldn't have done any more. The result came in a call from his agent. But Star Wars is so swathed in secrecy that he couldn't tell anyone he'd got the lead - apart from his mum and dad and his wife.
'I was on the set of Velvet Goldmine, my first day's filming. Walking around going like this (a Bobby Ball-like ball of excitement, biting his fist). God knows what everyone thought I was so happy about. The best thing, the really weird thing, will be eventually seeing it, you know, once all the effects have been added in, 'cause we won't have seen any of that. It'll be like seeing yourself in a dream or something.'
The Star Wars screen-test is probably not the most important audition Ewan McGregor has ever done. He describes the Agents Evening - where, after three years at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, students perform a song-and-dance number, a two-hander and a short solo piece in front of an audience consisting almost entirely of agents and casting directors - as 'a fucken nightmare! Just such a huge opportunity, totally terrifying.'
Having performed a scene from Withnail & I as his two-hander (the sink scene), McGregor's solo piece - something he'd written himself (about a legless oil-rig worker in Aberdeen) - was a disaster. Having wheeled himself on in a wheelchair, he dried up halfway through. 'I was sitting there, frantically rubbing my stumps, trying to remember my line. It was a really dark speech. The whole thing had one moment of light relief in it, one little joke, and that's what I missed.' It sounds as if it's still bugging him (a glitch in the greatest roll in acting history). But the next day, the offers came piling in.
Ironically, the only thing that dented his confidence about acting was three years at drama school, which, rather than teach him not to be self-conscious, had begun to make him feel it.
'Luckily, I managed to get through that on my own.' Up until then he had never doubted himself, ever since the age of nine, when he started to idolise his uncle, Local Hero actor Denis Lawson. 'It didn't even enter my head that it wouldn't work out.' Fortunately, his parents supported him, even agreeing to let him leave school at 16. 'I didn't hate school,' he remonstrates. 'I just didn't get it. I just remember not liking many of the teachers. They said I had attitude problems.' As his brother was head boy and his father taught PE, every time he got into trouble 'my parents would hear about it, which didn't seem fair'. Was he popular? 'I spent a lot of time trying to be. I wanted to be in every group, involved in every clique.'
He grew up in Crieff, in Perth, and had an improbably old-fashioned kind of boy's adventure childhood, spending his time 'kicking around in the countryside, firing catapults and stuff, riding horses every weekend.' He got a job within a week of leaving school - at a repertory theatre in Perth, moving scenery. His first professional acting role was 'running around wearing a turban' as an extra in A Passage To India.
Never fond of sport, McGregor would spend Saturday afternoons lying on the carpet in front of the TV watching black-and-white movies - which might account for the old-fashioned, romantic qualities he has brought to most of his roles, most notably Emma, Scarlet And Black and now A Life Less Ordinary (where he plays the sweet, naive one to Cameron Diaz's darker other half). He remembers futiley counting the days to the screening of the first episode of Lipstick On Your Collar, waiting for his life to change. Now, of course, it's changed for good, thanks to Renton.
Although each of the 'Trainspotters' initially had their own posters - from the book of the screenplay to the cover of the video or the soundtrack - gradually, McGregor's shivering frame became plastered across the nation's consciousness, until Trainspotting became Renton's story and Ewan McGregor's film.
The Trainspotting phenomenon so permeated British culture that even the Virgin Airways flight- information film now features a voice-over by McGregor, sounding unnervingly like Renton.
It's a weird experience: taking off, while getting safety advice from a bitter junkie. 'Aye, it's true. They wanted me to be the cheeky, cocky guy. There's one bit about not smoking, which sort of implies you might be smoking something other than cigarettes.' He goes into Renton's sneering cynicism. 'Put out all 'cigarettes'. Ha-ha.'
Part of the reason he has remained so unfazed by the impact Trainspotting created is probably that he was 'unaware of a lot of it'. Much of the hype and hysteria passed him by. He was in the States when Trainspotting mania hit the UK, and was filming in Ireland when it was unleashed in the States. But he says that, given the way the novel had taken off beforehand, its success never surprised him anyway. 'I was passionate about it from the beginning. Couldn't stop thinking about it.' Now that it's finally behind him, there are a few things we can confirm for good.
The three Trainspotting questions he was asked most were: 1. Did he use heroin for the part? Answer: No. Ewan doesn't go in for method (one) acting, though he did lose 30lbs for the role. 2. Did you really have to dive down a toilet? Answer: What do you think? 3. What does he think about the legalisation of drugs? Answer: 'My answer is, I don't know, but I don't imagine it's a terribly good idea.'
What does he think Renton would be doing now? 'Well, in the novel he goes to Amsterdam selling postcards. There's bit of him in a short story at the beginning of Acid House, and one at the end of A Smart Cunt, I think. I don't imagine he goes to Amsterdam and cleans up. I don't think he does stop taking smack, no. It's not that optimistic.'
He confirms that some of the funniest lines were cut from the screenplay because, 'for whatever reason, good or bad, from the beginning they were intent on making it exactly 90 minutes long.' His favourite moment in the film is 'the shot of Swanee sitting on the kerbside, just rocking back and forward, as the taxi pulls up. I think that's beautiful. I don't know why.' Though he obviously loved every minute of it, he says the truth is he would never have hung out with them, even Renton. Especially Renton.
'I quite like him. But I don't like the fact that he's given up. On everything. The press release said something like 'Mark Renton: a hero of our times'. I never thought that,' he argues, again sounding strangely aggrieved. 'He doesn't give a shit about anyone.'
It's a credit to the flair and restraint of his performance in Trainspotting that people still have difficulty in determining Renton was only a part, although the street cred has definitely not done him any harm. Bad-boy behaviour has never been his style. As a youth, he says, he never got into trouble. (His idea of 'trouble' is that he has 'dented some rental cars'). He has never been arrested ('I think I'd be terrified to be arrested'), and never experimented with drugs. 'I was never hard enough to do anything criminal, and there were never any drugs to experiment with. My parents must have lived to be 60 and never even seen them.' He dismisses the idea of taking drugs to shock his parents with the simple and rather sweet explanation, 'I liked them too much to do that.'
There is something unfashionably old-fashioned about McGregor, and something cavalier about the way he is so unlike the way a hip young actor is supposed to be. Even in the hell that is Cannes or the la-la land of LA, rather than play it cool or moan about the work load or artificiality of it all, McGregor has the temerity to enjoy every minute of it.
You wonder when the gleam in his eyes ever dips; whether he ever becomes grouchy or an absolute pain in the arse. He's not what you'd expect from a fashionable movie star brought to fame in swinging, Brit-Pop London. No drugs, no models, no nightclubs. He is, in fact, The Wrong Person for the job. His haircut, for example, is invariably Almost Awful - a sort of Denis Law/Rod Stewart job (something to do with being Scottish, perhaps?), one that always needs copious amounts of styling before magazines such as The Face consider him presentable. Part of his boyishness stems from retaining the same spiky Billy Idol job he had at school.
'Yeah, I know,' he beams. 'I'm not trendy at all. Most of my nice clothes I've got from films I've been in. It's quite frightening sometimes, the idea of the whole thing, being presented as something that you're not.' He has 'never really been into clubs', and has even started playing golf - 'moving into my Sean Connery stage a bit early'. His only vice, apart from smoking and drinking copiously, is 'razzing about London on an old 1974 Moto Guzzi'. His negligible amount of spare time is spent with his wife, Eve - a French production designer who he met working on Kavanagh QC - and their baby, Clara.
In early publicity for Shallow Grave, he admitted he'd struggled to feel comfortable playing such an aggressive and unpleasant role. At times he is so nice it borders on the boring. When our driver innocently asks why Trainspotting is called Trainspotting, Ewan McGregor runs through it all again, as if he doesn't realise how annoying this should be after what must be a thousand times. He laughs about how people would come up to them while they were filming in the housing schemes around Glasgow and respond to the title with 'Well, you'll no find many trains around here.'
Part of the preparations for A Life Less Ordinary involved going out to gun ranges learning to shoot - the first time he'd held a gun ('a wee, snub-nosed .45'). Whereas other young actors might go on about how cool this was, when he talks about the gun shop he instantly says 'it was fucken terrifying! It was huge, like a supermarket! Just full of things to kill people! I mean, why is it such a major issue in America, the right to have a gun? The right to kill.'
A Life Less Ordinary was originally mooted as the Trainspotting team's unconventional take on the mainstream American romantic comedy/road movie. But the most unconventional thing about the film is how conventional it is. Even allowing for the duo's darker trademarks (there's a suitcase full of money - 'more than one' - a grave in a forest and lots of bleeding), it is, as he says, 'really, really sweet. Incredibly romantic.'
McGregor, a janitor dreaming 'of something less ordinary' ends up rather haplessly kidnapping Diaz, bungling a bank heist and being pursued by two good-cop/bad-cop angels, played by Holly Hunter and Get Shorty's Delroy Lindo, with the toughest assignment of their careers: to make Diaz and McGregor fall in love. It's a sort of modern, Frank Capra-version of Wings Of Desire, and with it the Trainspotting trio have finally come undone, victims of their tendency for style over substance and (this time) not being as clever or dark as they think they are.
Andrew Macdonald's somewhat apologetic introduction at the first screening of the film last month - he urged us to 'try and look at it as just another Channel 4 film starring Ewan McGregor' - suggested that they too can tell that the sharp surrealism of the script just isn't happening on the screen. There isn't the necessary zest or chemistry to the slapstick and, after a promising start, A Life Less Ordinary becomes a touch ponderous.
For his own part, although his co-star's glamour makes him seem dull, McGregor's sweet nature shines through in a movie for almost the first time. Given the public's identification of him with Renton, this will no doubt come as a relief to both McGregor and George Lucas.
Even after Shallow Grave, where again he played the bitter cynic, agents or casting directors would underline that a role they were considering him for, 'wasn't in Scottish and was 'not the same as the one I played in Shallow Grave, and was that okay with me?' Of course it fucken is - that's what I do.' Watching him in A Life Less Ordinary, you can't help but notice that, although he is always convincing as the character, he is also at all times somehow still himself. Maybe this is what Hollywood sees in him. Danny Boyle has identified this as the knack that stars such as Sean Connery or Michael Caine have.
'He brings the character to him,' Boyle has said. A Life Less Ordinary is another film, in which 'he lets the film happen around him. A lot of this film happens to him, and the big decisions are made by characters around him. A lot of actors wouldn't be happy with that.' This, of course, is what happened in Trainspotting. While everyone else was acting their socks off, Renton is the calm heart in the middle of it all. When they were making Trainspotting, after a couple of weeks' shooting, McGregor got worried that he wasn't doing anything.
'There's not much to do in a lot of scenes except watch.' He even talked to Danny Boyle about it. 'He just said, 'I think that's just the way it's got to be,' and he was right. I panicked. It's the hardest thing about acting. I think Danny knows that. Having a nervous breakdown, screaming and shouting, is the easiest part. Actors fucken love doing all that, never happier than when they're crying their eyes out. I always remember, during Shallow Grave, any time anyone was doing a big bit, a big emotional bit, Danny would just go 'Okay, let's move on'. If you'd just been sitting there, he'd come and encourage you, say 'well done' and everything.' Michael Caine himself would be proud of the comment he makes about playing a reporter on a local paper in Shallow Grave, saying 'basically, if you've got a note-pad and pen, you can be a journalist'. Though McGregor is still naive and eager enough to find it thrilling working with Nick Nolte or shaking Dennis Hopper's hand at a party, Hollywood just doesn't agree with him. 'I love London. If I'm ever there! I've just bought a house in St John's Wood, which one day I might actually move into. I've got an agent over in LA so I get scripts from there.' He is still not frightened of being ridiculously indiscreet about some of Hollywood's major players - most notably Jim Carrey ('I cannot look at him') and James Cameron - her once famously described the concept of a Dollars 200-million movie such as Cameron's Titanic fiasco as 'sick, a disgrace. Anyone who's involved with that kind of film-making should be ashamed of themselves.' (Star Wars, he maintains, laughing, is different.) 'So much of Hollywood is just bullshit. So insincere,' he gasps with rather touching incredulity. When Shallow Grave appeared at the Sundance Film Festival, the cast were whisked around LA for a week, doing press, and meeting people from the studios. 'They had no idea who I was and I didn't know any of them,' he scoffs. 'Inevitably, they tell you how fantastic you are and how much they love your work, even though you know they've never seen you in anything!' He must know he has more of it to come, but nothing really seems to get in his way. Even if you push him into finding something negative about the sort of life he has been propelled into, the only thing he comes up with - what effect his work and the moving around will have on the baby, what happens when she's older and going to school - he talks about it as quite a positive problem, because it's about his baby. The problem of remaining ordinary, of keeping something normal to Ewan McGregor's life when everything is going his way, doesn't worry him, although he sometimes worries that something absolutely awful is waiting to happen to him. He takes his normal life, his baby and his wife, with him. When he had grown tired of moving around and 'just wanted to be ordinary', he just stopped and went home. At first, it seems his confidence is misplaced. After all, as soon as he had done this, revived his ordinary life, he promptly signed up for Star Wars, one film you can guarantee will ensure that his life is never ordinary again. Being in ER is one thing, but Star Wars is mythical, as big a piece of film history as you can achieve. No one gets to be in Star Wars. Not due for release until the summer of 1999, Star Wars guarantees that even if he has a two-year lull, Ewan McGregor has big fame, real fame, worldwide popularity waiting for him, on hold. His name, his fame, will be held over into the next millennium and a place in film history as part of the biggest series of films ever made. Push him on how he feels about dealing with this, he says, 'I don't know. I don't think about it. I've never thought about it.' There is no surprise in this, although you might assume he would think about it all the time; think about nothing but this. But when someone so young is about to experience something much bigger than they've ever experienced before, they have no way of thinking about it. It's like being a tight-rope walker and someone asking what it's like when you look down. Thinking about it is probably the main thing that can stop you from doing it. Think about it now, I tell him, but it doesn't really work. 'Er, I don't know. I haven't considered it 'cause maybe it is too scary to think about. I think what it will mean to me is that I can carry on just banging out movies here, do the kind of films I do now, small movies that I'm interested in.' This sounds disingenuous, luvvie wishful thinking. But in a sense it's probably true. Once you've done three Star Wars films, where else do you go? How do you top that? Time will tell how it works out, but, until then, it could be that doing Star Wars is actually Ewan McGregor's unusual but ingenious way of staying ordinary.
