Star Wars was crucial to Ewan McGregor ‘s career long before he played Obi-Wan Kenobi, as McGregor explained at the Newport Beach Film Festival Tuesday.
Before receiving the festival’s TV Performer of the Year Award, the Trainspotting and Fargo star spoke with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg for a Sunset Series career retrospective. As the tangerine horizon gave way to a gorgeous night, they went from McGregor’s earliest roles to his latest, in the acclaimed Paramount + series A Gentleman in Moscow.
But it all started when McGregor was a boy in Crieff, Scotland, and went to see his uncle, Denis Lawson, in the original 1977 Star Wars.
McGregor had already been impressed by Lawson’s indifference to conformity — “it was a small, conservative Scottish town. He’d be wearing flares and beads and sheepskin waistcoats and no shoes,” McGregor recalled. And he’d seen before him on television. But that didn’t prepare him for the sight of his uncle on the big screen as Wedge Antilles, one of the brave X-Wing pilots who joins Luke Skywalker in trying to blow up the Death Star.
“We went to the big city, probably Perth — which is a very small city — but we went to the big city. My brother and I were picked up after school in our school uniforms. We went to the cinema to see Uncle Denis in a movie. And it turned out it was Star Wars, which you can imagine, just blew my break tiny brain apart,” McGregor recalled.
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McGregor still has a close relationship with Lawson: “When I want to talk about acting or the business or a choice or a decision or something, he’s really one of the few people I would think to talk to about those things,” he said.
Ironically, at one point Lawson advised him not to play Kenobi. Noting that Lawson doesn’t love him telling the story, McGregor recalled that his uncle suggested he not sign on for the prequels — The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith — in which he played a younger version of Kenobi, the Jedi master first played by Alec Guinness in the original Star Wars trilogy.
“He did say, ‘Don’t do it. … If you want a career after 30, don’t do it,'” McGregor laughed.
McGregor noted that many British actors — including Guinness — appeared in Star Wars films but didn’t always understand their incredible appeal.
“But now Dennis is doing the conventions with me and we’re signing autographs, so he doesn’t like me telling the story anymore!” McGregor laughed.
Ewan McGregor on His Falling Out and Reunion With Danny Boyle
The Phantom Menace arrived at a critical time in McGregor’s career. He had caught Danny Boyle’s attention after appearing in Dennis Potter’s six-part 193 Channel 4 series Lipstick on Your Collar. (McGregor said he got the role after an audition in which he wasn’t trying too hard, because he wanted a role in a different project more.)
He went on to star in Boyle’s 1994 Shallow Grave, 1996’s Trainspotting — the breakout film for both McGregor and Boyle — and 1997’s A Life Less Ordinary.
McGregor hoped to star in Boyle’s The Beach, which came out in 2000. But under financial pressure for a hit, Boyle cast Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh off the success of 1997’s Titanic.
“It was hard. It was hard… because they were my friends, and we were doing something — I felt like we were building something important, because it was so important to me, and it made me feel afterwards that I wasn’t that important to them,” McGregor recalled. “And because I was led to believe that I was in The Beach for a long time. That’s why it was hard, not just because I didn’t get the part.”
He added: “I think they kept me in case Leonardo changed his mind… They weren’t honest with me at the time, and that’s why it was really, really hard, because I was brokenhearted by my — not only my friends, but by people that were so important to me — and it was done in such an offhand way. … And I was floored, you know, for a long time. It took my confidence away, and it floored me, and it was a hard lesson to learn.”
But he and Boyle eventually made up.
“It sort of happened over time — we’d bump into each other, and it would be like seeing an old lover or something, who you didn’t expect to bump into at a party,” McGregor said. “I did something at the Shanghai Film Festival, and on the way over there, on the plane, found out that that Danny was the head of the jury, and I was like, ‘Nobody told me that!’
But later, he was asked to present Boyle an award, around the time of Boyle’s success with Slumdog Millionaire — and said yes.
“They always send this rubbish thing with a few stupid gags that nobody likes. So I said, ‘I’ll write my own.’ … I got there, and I was behind Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Robert De Niro was there, and I suddenly thought — I occasionally forget my lines on stage — I thought, ‘What if I don’t remember?'” McGregor recalled.
“But once I got up there, I was able to talk about his work that he’d done with me, and how it felt working with him, how it felt being his actor, and how it felt to look across the set and see him and feel good, like feel that you were in really good hands. And as a result, work would come out of you that you didn’t expect.
“And I talked about that. And then I listed all the films he’d made after we start stopped working together, and then I talked about them a bit, and I was able to say that I loved him and I missed him, and I was happy to be presenting him with this award, but I was able to do it all to him like he was sitting… and I was able to just say it to him.
“It was an amazing moment for me, because I thought, ‘It’s time to put all that to bed.’ These things happen. I’ll always love Danny Boyle, because he’s given me my career. … I am still his actor, as far as I’m concerned, because he taught me what it means in a way.”
Ewan McGregor on A Gentleman in Moscow
Boyle and McGregor collaborated again in T2 Trainspotting in 2017. That same year, McGregor launched a thriving TV career, playing dual roles as two brothers on FX’s Fargo. He met his wife, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, while shooting the series.
His TV roles have included leading parts in FX’s Halston, Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, and now Paramount+’s A Gentleman in Moscow.
In the series, based on the novel by Amor Towles, McGregor plays Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who is banished to house arrest in a hotel room following the October Revolution. He stars opposite Winstead.
“I’m sure some of you have read the book, and if you haven’t, it’s a wonderful novel. It’s absolutely beautiful. I didn’t realize how close it was to me until I was making it.
“It’s lots of things, but it’s a beautiful love story, and I had the absolute pleasure of playing this beautiful story, love story, with my wife. And I’d never been happier than playing those scenes with her. It was just absolutely wonderful. She’s amazing, my favorite actress, and I got a chance to play these beautiful scenes with her. And there’s a scene at the end where, I won’t spoil it — there’s an emotional scene at the end that we just barely could get through. We were both blubbing our eyes out playing it.”
The full interview, recorded at Newport Beach’s Resort at Pelican Hill, will appear soon on Feinberg’s Awards Chatter podcast.