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
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.
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 love film people and actors and I am in the right world because I am one of those people.
I wanted to go and explore the world, I guess. And I suddenly thought well, I'll just do it.
I grew up in a very small town in Scotland, a little place called Crieff which is beautiful and it's at the foothills to the highlands. It's a very beautiful part of the world. It's a small, I suppose quite conservative place.
It's just fantastic to go out and meet people in the world and get to really remote places.
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.