Ewan McGregor
Ewan McGregor
Ewan Gordon McGregor, OBE is a Scottish actor. His first professional role was in 1993, when he won a leading role in the Channel 4 series Lipstick on Your Collar. He is best known for his roles as heroin addict Mark Renton in the drama Trainspotting, the young Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, poet Christian in the musical film Moulin Rouge!, and Dr. Alfred Jones in the romantic comedy-drama Salmon Fishing in the Yemen...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth31 March 1971
CityPerth, Scotland
I left it for seven years before going back on stage. I know now not to leave it so long.
I'm sure it's not great fun for them, or for any parent, when their child says they want to be an actor, 'cos it's quite an uncertain business and it can be terribly hard for most actors.
I'm not a guy who takes films for strong political messages.
I'm lucky enough that financially I don't have to feel obliged to go for the bigger stuff. I like the stories and scripts to dictate if I want to do them.
It was a natural progression for Jude and I -- that's where we started off.
The script, I always believe, is the foundation of everything. And if you don't connect to that foundation, if you don't believe in that and feel that you wanna spend three, four months of your life exploring it, then all of the other elements are secondary.
For all of the hurtling towards climate change, there's also a lot more understanding of it than there was when we were kids. They don't call environmentalists tree huggers any more, so there's hope!
This is purely an attempt to do some good theatre, commission new writing, adapt the classics and to do our own thing.
So, no, I'm not trying to crack into Hollywood, although I'll make films there if they're good scripts.
Sometimes I feel like doing smaller budget stuff. When I did 'Young Adam', for instance, I'd come out of 'Black Hawk Down' and 'The Island', and I really wanted to be on a small film set. I wanted to be on something intimate and small again, and then 'Young Adam' cropped up in a pile of scripts I was sent.
Drama school can't make you a brilliant actor, but you can do stuff for three years - you're not going to be fired. You should just go for it all, even the stuff you think is codswallop.
The film I like the best is always the one I'm working on now or next.
There's something that happens where you go, if you're lucky, goodness me, from film to another film to another film. And you can sort of feel that if you step off that treadmill, it might all go horribly wrong and you might never be employed again, you know. And I suddenly thought that that's not necessarily the case. And I also thought we make drama as actors about people in the world and that if you are on that treadmill, you start making films about other films.
It is always a nice feeling when you are challenged by a scene and you walk out of trailer and you go on set going I don't know. And then half an hour later you're walking back.