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 won`t buy into the Hollywood thing...I want to be in good movies.
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 left it for seven years before going back on stage. I know now not to leave it so long.
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.
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.
This is purely an attempt to do some good theatre, commission new writing, adapt the classics and to do our own thing.
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.
So, no, I'm not trying to crack into Hollywood, although I'll make films there if they're good scripts.
If we don't find some more birds fast, our goose is cooked.
Nicole - Knickers, as I call her. I would swear, burp and fart in front of her. I'd try and embarrass her and she would pretend to be shocked. I always played up on that. It was a real elder sister-younger brother relationship.' - on his and Nicole's relationship on Moulin Rouge
No, I haven't got any tattoos. Not yet.
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!