The driver opens the throttle, the engines roar and Ewan McGregor grins
spontaneously as the boat surges into the open water. (His kid-like pleasure
in loud, fast machines clearly extends beyond his well-documented passion
for motorbikes.) We are in in a speed boat powering across the Venice
lagoon, heading towards the Hotel Cipriani, bastion of old-school glamour
and the lodging of choice for everyone from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks
to McGregor and George Clooney, his co-star in the US army satire The Men
Who Stare at Goats, which has just premiered at the Venice Film Festival —
and which is the Times Gala film at the LFF.
Lean and lightly tanned, wearing dark denim jeans and black T-shirt, McGregor
is reclined on the cream leather upholstery looking infinitely more relaxed
than he did when I first met him, on dry land and caught in a scrum of
excitable fans and photographers, calling, grasping, staring, snapping shots
with their mobile phones. The attention seems to make him profoundly
uncomfortable. Climbing into the boat, he beamed with relief, relaxing
palpably, and made proper eye contact for the first time.
“It’s not like that for me usually, it’s usually pretty calm,” he says, over
the fading sound of autograph hunters plaintively calling “Oowan, Oowan!”
from the shore. “At film festivals there are pockets of craziness, where
people know where you are and hang around outside. But usually it’s fine. I
think for George [Clooney] it’s different. There are packs of people
following him around and it’s just unbearable.”
From the hottest new face of British cinema, wet and wasted on the iconic
Trainspotting poster, to a Jedi in a sci-fi mega-franchise, to a
motorbike-straddling adventurer sporting one of the most unflattering beards
in television history, the transformations of Ewan McGregor have been many
and varied. He exudes a preternaturally healthy glow — all sparkling skin
and clear eyes. Next to him, normal people look tired, cross and slightly
grubby.
Although Clooney is the bigger name, McGregor has the main role in The Men Who
Stare At Goats, which premiered to an enthusiastic response. The film is
loosely based on the book of the same name by British journalist Jon Ronson.
McGregor plays a disillusioned reporter escaping a failed marriage who
stumbles on the scoop of a lifetime when he meets former US Army special
operative Lyn Cassady (Clooney). Cassady claims he was part of an elite
squad of soldiers called the New Earth Army who were trained to develop
psychic skills to do battle using the forces of the paranormal. It’s a loopy
and very funny premise, approached not with cynicism but rather a warmth and
affection for the idealistic nutjobs who genuinely believe they can make the
world a better place with the power of their minds. McGregor — who gets many
of the film’s best lines — plays the character with whom the audience most
identifies. We see the madness unfold through his eyes.
McGregor immediately responded to the character. “I liked him because of his
journey. I liked playing someone who was broken. It was so much fun to play
the guy whose wife had left him for the one-armed balding newspaper editor.”
He chuckles. “I don’t know why I find that so amusing.” Behind the camera
was actor, writer and producer Grant Heslov, the man who lent the unknown
Clooney the money to get a set of headshots done. The pair have been close
friends and collaborators ever since.
“It felt like they had their own style. They like the same kind of
film-making. And I liked it as well — it was very quick. There was something
unprecious about it.” But although Clooney has a reputation as an on-set
prankster, McGregor reports, with a mixture of relief and the slightest hint
of disappointment, that he didn’t fall victim to any of Clooney’s japes. “I
have friends who have. A friend of mine Bill Fichtner, who he worked with on
A Perfect Storm, he had this lovely hot rod car and it was his pride and
joy. He drove it to work one day. And George put a couple of quarts of oil
on the ground underneath the engine. Then they all hid. Bill was walking
back from the set and he looked at his car, he was like, ‘I love my car’.
Then he saw all this oil coming out from underneath it. And he was crawling
around on his knees close to tears because he thought his engine had blown
up or something.”
Has he ever had a spooky, unexplained experience? “I have had one weird
ghostly thing on my 20th birthday,” he says, eyes twinkling — one senses
this might be a story that has been embellished over the years. “I was
living in a house near Manor House in London. I was wandering around in my
dressing gown, running a bath. Suddenly I felt this horrible pain in my
back. I ripped off my dressing gown and I had this huge burn mark all across
the back of my dressing gown. The next day my friend who lived downstairs
was there. I was telling him the story and he went white.” The friend
revealed that an old man who had previously lived in the house had been
caught in a kitchen fire and had died from burns to his back. “I went ‘Oh
s**t!’ We were all going to sleep in my friend’s room because we were so
freaked out. He put his hand on the cupboard and said, ‘Look, it’s as dusty
as when the old man used to live here.’ Then just at that moment, the whole
ceiling of the living room collapsed on our heads. Two or three weeks later,
I left.”
Although he is only 38, it feels as if McGregor has been around for a long
time. An ambitious school drop-out from Crieff in Scotland who was inspired
to act by his charismatic uncle, Denis Lawson, he was cast in his first
major production (Dennis Potter’s Lipstick On Your Collar) before he had
graduated from London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. But it was the
role of heroin addict Mark Renton in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting that
catapulted him into stardom. McGregor cashed in on his Trainspotting kudos
with a canny combination of quality art-house films (Velvet Goldmine, Moulin
Rouge!, Young Adam) and profile-boosting studio pictures (Star Wars:
Episodes I, II, and III, Angels and Demons).
Star Wars is not the kind of opportunity any actor would turn down, and is
certain to be a source of ongoing excitement for his children — he has
three, two daughters, Clara and Esther, with his wife, French production
designer Eve Mavrakis, and in 2006, the couple adopted Jamiyan, a
four-year-old girl from Mongolia. But the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi was not one
that tested his abilities. McGregor said about it at the time: “Acting to
mid-air is odd. There’s a perverse pleasure to it when you get it right, but
often you don’t.”
It’s perhaps not fair to say he has lost his mojo of late, but in a trio of
turkeys like Incendiary, Cassandra’s Dream and Scenes of a Sexual Nature,
McGregor wasn’t always living up to the potential for greatness he
demonstrated in his early work. But with this film and the gay romantic
comedy I Love You Phillip Morris, this year has turned out to be something
of a landmark for McGregor. He has delivered two exceptionally strong comic
performances that have got the industry genuinely excited.
“I think that the secret of comedy is not trying to make it funny. Last year I
did Phillip Morris with Jim Carrey, and because Jim is a comedian there was
much more effort made to make the jokes work. I found myself trying to do
that. And I found that whenever I tried to do that, it’s the least funniest
thing you have ever seen. They would go ‘Cut!’ And I would see people in the
crew going, what the f*** was that?”
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