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
A million pounds sounds like a lot of money now that I'm saying it. But in terms of moviemaking, it's not a lot of money. And yet you can see what can be done with that, with the talent of a great cinematographer and great director and actors.
I have worked with a lot of great directors but my favorites are all entirely different from one another. They don't go about it the same way.
I don't like being told that's where you, you know, if you walk on set and somebody was "okay, you're here and you're going to walk over there on this line." And my reaction is always how do you know? How do you know that's what I'm going to do? How do any of us know?
There's nothing worse than shooting a scene you haven't rehearsed.
For the actors, there's something very important about that first showing of the scene to the crew, becomes like a little performance.
There's very few directors that know what that rehearsal's for. And often it's just about calming down the director. If he could see it or she sees it, she goes oh, it's going to be okay.
You would never dream of going on to play a scene in front of an audience at least without having rehearsed it. But you do somehow in front of a camera.
I love exploring in a rehearsal room with other actors, scenes and you know, stuff you are scared of.
When you've got a date on your calendar saying that you will be putting this in front of people in four weeks, that will get your nerves good, yeah.
I can't know what I'm going to do before I'm in front of the lens. And I think that sort of makes it exciting.
I believe that unless it's a scene where I'm alone, then of course I could do what I want but I think good acting is about what happens between people, not on your face and my face.
I don't want to make decisions about what I'm going to do before I'm doing it because I base my acting off my partner and off the other people in the scene.
I wanted to make sure that I was making films about the world. So I thought well, I should go and see it. I'm spending a lot of time in - we call them caravans in Britain.
I was spending a lot of time in trailers, you know, on film sets surrounded by film people.