Fashion Magazine

WHITE HEAT: From Black Hawk to Jedi Knight
Fashion Magazine, Spring 2002

"So anyway, he's a c---!"
Ewan McGregor leans back in his chair, mouth full of pizza, pauses and then guffaws, scattering shards of pepperoni skin. This curse comes at the end of a sustained and righteous rant; it's a deflating summation, the bathetic "c---." And a deft touch. He means it, though.
"He is," says McGregor, recovering. "He really is." The c--- in question is the editor of a kick/kiss celebrity-a** weekly magazine published in Britain. Just before our interview, said magazine published pictures of Ewan's second child, a 4-week-old girl -- "My new daughter; my baby, f***ing close up" -- despite a request from McGregor's publicist that they resist the urge to do so and, McGregor says, an assurance from the editor that they would not. Ewan is not happy.
"They just don't give a f---, do they? I'd like to know how he's going to feel on his deathbed, knowing that his sole contribution to the world has been stealing people's privacy. He can put a picture of my 5 1/2 year old daughter [McGregor now has two girls] on the front of a magazine. And I can't do anything about that. I don't want people to know what she looks like. And I don't want her to be bothered with that. She's just a wee girl."
Ewan McGregor is famously good-humoured and fun to interview. And he does not disappoint. All this railing is delivered sotto voice in his endearing, easy-on-the-ear accent, almost the exact same one that Mike Myers used for Shrek. And it's regularly punctuated with gags and giggles. But he is tired, and things just seem to have got a little weird and out of control recently.
"I'm beginning to despair, and I don't know what I can do. It's not a big deal in the scale of things, but it is my life. If I see another photographer outside my house, I'm really worried for what I might do." He laughs. The image of him pulling a Sean Penn and battering one of the paparazzi with a brick is ridiculous, but you can see that it appeals.

The thing is, this is just the beginning. Right now, Ewan has to do publicity for both Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down and the second Star Wars prequel, Attack of the Clones, two of the most eagerly anticipated movies since, well, since Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. (There is something of a surfeit of eager anticipation at the moment.) After Gladiator, Ridley Scott is finally the titanic force he always imagined he was. Everyone is eager to see what he serves up next. And Black Hawk Down, the story of the disastrous 1993 US intervention in Mogadishu that resulted in the deaths of eighteen members of the elite Delta Force and Ranger infantry, has been given an obvious extra charge by the war in Afghanistan. Attack of the Clones, meanwhile, has to convince the public that the second batch of Star Wars movies are not a massive folly on the part of George Lucas. And that Ewan can make a better go of portraying the young Obi-Wan Kenobi than he did the first time out. McGregor is the first to admit that filming Phantom Menace was not the happiest of experiences for him and that he had trouble nailing the beatific dignity and Zen calm of the Jedi Knight. The Jedi's ability to see into the future was particularly problematic. How do you display the reactions of someone who already knows what is going to happen? Alec Guinness, the original Obi-Wan, settled on a constant benign half-smile; Ewan's Wan frowned a lot.
If things go well, he will emerge from the next few months as the top-drawer draw he has always threatened to be. But that will just mean more s**t. And not just intrusive photographer s**t. Other s**t. S**t like this vignette, from Ewan's press duty for Moulin Rouge, which also starred Nicole Kidman. "I arrived at the premiere in London with my wife, and Nicole is right in front of me," McGregor says, now deep in a groove. "And I'm really up and excited, because it's the premiere of my movie. Anyway, there's this line of television people, and this girl goes to me, 'So, you know all the rumours -- what really went on with you and Nicole during filming?' I'm like, my wife is beside me, Nicole is in front of me. I just couldn't find the words to express the insanity of the question. So I just go, 'How dare you?' But she just comes back: 'Oh come on, she's so beautiful.' And the thing is, there was no affair, but more to the point there were no rumours at the time. But suddenly, long after we're finished filming, there were rumors because this woman says there were."
McGregor acknowledges this is extreme. But petty annoyances are common. "This guy came up to me in Scotland and said, 'Well I've got to say, Alec Guinness was a much better Obi-Wan Kenobi than you will ever be.' And he looked at me with a big smile on his face like I should agree with him. Like, Thank you very much for your observation. You know what? You are absolutely right.
"I don't think it's really people's fault though. I'm trying to get to the bottom of it. I wish I could just get angry about it, but I can't. I keep trying to see it from their side of the fence. It's just very bizarre."

Ewan McGregor tries to keep the bizarre to a minimum these days. He lives in St. John's Wood, a tony but anonymous part of the North London that was sort of swinging in the 60's -- Abbey Road is around the corner -- but is now just a calm collection of large white stucco houses. Ewan, still only 30, lives with his wife Eve, a French production designer he met in 1994 and married a year and a half later, and his daughters, Clara, aged 5 1/2, and Esther, just arrived. His one concession to movie star excess is a large collection of motorcycles that he keeps in his garage. (During the evening he spots a copy of Vanity Fair, a recent Brad Pitt cover. McGregor is eager to have a look because he's heard that Pitt has been shot riding a nice bike. Vanity Fair, of course, loves hot young actors on bikes: In 1998, they shot McGregor himself, ginger hair flowing romantically behind him, astride his Ducati 748 SP, a great yellow beastie of a bike.)
He takes me to a little Italian cafe near his house. The staff greet him extravagantly and Ewan points out their impressive display of panettone cakes, apparently the largest selection in London. Panettone cake is a cult foodstuff here, so this is a serious selling point.
In black thick-rimmed specs, jeans that are a little too tight and a scruffy flying jacket, he looks like a young lecturer at some provincial university, dismayed by the indifference of his young charges to the Smiths. And he's thinner than you'd expect. Not the whippet he was as Renton in Trainspotting, his breakthrough role. But not quite the man he was afterwards, either, the one who, having reupholstered himself with the twenty-five pounds he lost for the part, always looked a little, well, puffy, fighting above his weight. He is probably still trim from the inevitable military training that the cast of Black Hawk Down had to endure before filming. "Ewen Bremner [McGregor's co-star in Trainspotting] was in Black Hawk Down with me. And he was also in Pearl Harbor. They did the full-on boot camp thing for that and he got really knocked about." Reports from the Pearl Harbor set suggested that Bremner spent much of this training period retching and wishing for an early death. "Anyway, on the way over to this training camp at Fort Benning, Ewen told us these nightmare stories. And when we got there, there was this guy waiting for us, standing at ease with a razor cut and everything. That was when the reality sunk in."
In fact, reckons McGregor, the Black Hawk Downers got off comparatively lightly. "What they actually did with us was more of a Ranger orientation program, as opposed to a boot camp. We did a lot of classroom stuff, weapons training. We learned how to move down a street under fire. Now, if a street was under fire, the last f***ing thing I would do is move down it. But if you had to do it, we learned how to do it in the safest way possible."
McGregor enjoyed the training and the actors, including Bremner, Josh Hartnett and Tom Sizemore, soon built up a convincing comraderie. They also found themselves in close quarters to real-life Rangers. "We had four Black Hawk helicopters and four Mini Bird helicopters on call for a month and a half. And the thing is, the Rangers have to be preparted to be anywhere in the world within eighteen hours. So the helicopters came with 250 soldiers, fully tooled up. It was very weird."
With 250 heavily armed men watching their every move, the actors did their best to do the Rangers proud. "They were very aware that the battle could be portrayed in a way that made a mockery of the regiment. I don't think it's portrayed like that, and I wouldn't have wanted to do that. Some of the guys we were working with lost mates in Mogadishu. We all took it very seriously, especially the actors playing Delta Force guys. They were drilling the stunt guns before every take, 'C'mon, guns up, laces tied.' I play a Ranger, and there's a lot in the book [Mark Bowden's fine Black Hawk Down, on which the film is based] about how the Rangers looked up to the Delta Guys in this kind of girly fashion. Which I don't really think is the case. And neither do the Rangers, funnily enough. So we toned that down a bit."
Black Hawk Down was one of a number of movies that seemed certain to fall foul of the appropriateness-check that followed September 11. As US Army Rangers headed out to Afghanistan, a movie depicting their part in a botched and bloody operation in Somalia -- at the time the longest sustained battle involving American soldiers since the Vietnam War -- seemed destined to be derailed by events. In fact, Columbia pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer hit the accelerator on Black Hawk Down. Originally slated to appear this March, the release date was brought to December. "There is such a buzz about the movie. And it actually finished early," says McGregor. "So they thought they would just get it out there. And this way it is out in time for the Oscars."
McGregor is fine with that and has no truck with arguments that the film should have been stalled, if not shelved for good. "So you make a film about 19-year-olds going into war and then people say it's not appropriate. Well, surely it's more appropriate than ever. If you are going to f***ing send them in, you have to face up to what they do. If you don't like it, don't send them in. The double standards that are flying around at the moment are just beyond me."
The events portrayed in Black Hawk Down had a deep impact on American foreign policy and helped establish what became known as the Powell Doctrine; in effect, bomb the s**t out of somewhere before you risk sending in ground troops. Ironically, McGregor has come away from filming the movie convinced that the Powell Doctrine is a crock. "It has to be the absolute last straw, I know, but if you are going to do it then you have to go and f***ing do it. You can't just do this media-friendly bombing war. I think the Kosovo conflict would have been over in weeks if they would have sent in ground troops. And a lot of people's lives would have been saved as a result. They are soldiers, that is what they are trained to do. And no one is forcing them to do it anymore. I'm sick of seeing American women on the telly going 'My boy got sent in and now he's captured and that's not why he joined the army.' Well what did he join the f***ing army for?"
Once on a roll, there's no stopping him. He quickly moves on to George W. Bush. While it's still off-season on Bush-bashing, let's just say Ewan McGregor is not a fan and leave it at that. The thing is, he's a long way from L.A., but he'd say the same thing on Leno. It's not a controversy-seeking shtick, nor any kind of shtick at all. He just has the strangely old-fashioned notion that when he is called upon to promote a movie, he is not pushing himself but the product of a collective enterprise. It's a matter of responsibility to the film rather than self-promotion, the idea that the film rather than the interview advances his career. And so really he can say what the f*** he likes.

McGregor grew up in Creiff, in Perthshire, Scotland. His father, Jim, was a P.E. teacher, his mother, Carol, was a special-needs teacher, and his brother Colin, two years older and now a pilot in the Royal Air Force, was head boy, team captain, academic star and all-around pain in the a**. Ewan suffered by comparison. He joined the school orchestra but Colin was already the trumpet player, the glamour role, so Ewan ended up on the French horn. He became quite good at it, actually. (Recently, he bought a pocket trumpet which plays at exactly the same pitch as a normal trumpet, but all the piping is cleverly condensed. McGregor can, he reckons, knock out a decent "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." He also plays guitar and is trying to learn the five-string banjo.)
Ewan did not dislike school -- he liked running around chasing girls, especially Nicola Mackintosh -- but he did not see the point. For as long as he can remember he has wanted to act. This was likely Uncle Denis' fault.
Uncle Denis was Denis Lawson, an actor of some note in Britain who also happened to play X-wing ace Wedge Antilles in the original Star Wars movies. (Lawson visited the set while young Ewan was at work as young Obi-Wan and observed that Lucas was wearing what looked like a shirt he had worn during the making of the original movie, a quarter of a century earlier. Lucas admitted that it was indeed the same shirt.)
Denis was Ewan's mom's brother and a very exotic creature on his visits to Crieff in the early '70s. Lawson had the Zapata mustache, beads, suede waistcoat, flares; he was everything a rising young thespian of the period should be. Ewan knew this was the life for him. Indeed, so sure was he of his destiny that he gave up school plays at the age of 5, after an impressive turn as the Sheriff of Nottingham, deciding that he should save himself for when he was called upon to act professionally. At 16, Ewan's parents agreed, much to his astonishment and delight, that he should leave school and pursue acting. He spent six months with the Perth Repertory Company before moving to London and attending the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Six months before graduating in 1993, he got a part as an office nerd who thinks he's Elvis in a British TV drama called Lipstick on Your Collar. It was written by Dennis Potter, who also wrote Pennies from Heaven and is considered a Shakespeare of the small screen in Britain. (McGregor later worked with Potter on another TV drama, Karoake, just before Potter died of pancreatic cancer. McGregor describes him rather touchingly as "a dirty man but a lovely man, a great man I think.") Since Lipstick, McGregor has made an average of other three films a year.
Star status came with Trainspotting in 1996. But if superstardom was then just around the corner, McGregor has done everything he can to get lost along the way. He refuses to move to L.A. and rails against those who have, most famously Minnie Driver. "She's gone mad," he once spouted. "She goes to opening of an envelope, she wears little dresses all the time. I am so disappointed by her." He later said that he felt bad about the attack but remains disdainful of L.A. "They're all bastards, the studio executives, the studio people, the people who live in L.A."
His choice of roles has not always been the astute: Nightwatch? Eye of the Beholder? The Serpent's Kiss? And films that promised much failed to deliver. A Life Less Ordinary, Danny Boyle's 1997 follow-up to Trainspotting, while no turkey, was not the superkinetic screwball-caper classic it set out to be. "Maybe we didn't nail it like we could have," admits McGregor. "But Cameron Diaz is gorgeous in it."
Still, McGregor has managed to avoid the fate that befalls most British stars who successfully cross the Atlantic; no stuttering fops or fiendish villains with facial tics and Christopher Walken hair feature in his resume, so far anyway. And as far as British stars go, he now has serious pull. Only Connery, Hopkins, Hugh Grant, Daniel Day-Lewis and Gary Oldman command higher fees.
He will still proceed with care, of course. And it is not too late for him to try the tactic of the moment for British actors working in America: making people forget you're British. it worked for Christian Bale, McGregor's costar in Velvet Goldmine, as well as Tigerland's Colin Farrell and Damian Lewis, McGregor's contemporary at London's Guildhall, who anchored Band of Brothers with astonishing assuredness and an immaculate American accent.
Anyway, that won't work for Ewan. He is still committed to that famous non sequitur, the British Film Industry . In 1998, he formed the production company Natural Nylon with Jonny Lee Miller, Jude Law, Law's wife Sadie Frost, and Sean Pertwee. So far, they have helped produce the not particularly eXinsteZ and the very British Nora, in which McGregor played James Joyce and which no one saw.
McGregor is undaunted, despite the difficulties of making movies in England. His next film will be Young Adam, a story of canal folk in 1950s Scotland. Even with McGregor and Tilda Swinton attached, the film had difficulty securing enough funding.
Stil, he has enough on his plate. He always has stuff on his plate. (He admits that he often finds himself wondering why he agreed to do certain things.) He has developed a nice sideline in making wildlife films with the BBC (he nearly got devoured by a polar bear on his first outing) and is soon off to spend five weeks ice-diving in the Arctic Circle looking for whales -- exciting, but not necessarily the way you'd expect a rising Hollywood contender to be spending his time.
Tonight, apart from spitting bits of pepperoni pizza at me, Ewan has a rare night off and wants to spend what's left of it with his wife and children. We walk back to his garden gate, and I can tell he is a little uneasy about letting me in on the location of Casa McGregor. I pretend to be lost, reassuring him that I could not direct paparazzi to his lair even if I had the inclination to do so. Actually, I am lost and Ewan directs me to the nearest Tube station. I leave him scanning the area for roving photographers and rogue crazies, read to draw issue with this or that.
"C---s," I hear him mutter, under his breath.