Ewan McGregor brought the house down at Edinburgh’s Central Hall las night with a once-in-a-lifetime re-enactment of his 1992 performance in Joe Orton’s play What the Butler Saw at Salisbury Playhouse. Fully clothed, the actor gave an athletic display of what occurred that fateful night, when, naked but for a policeman’s helmet over his groin, McGregor not only tripped and fell, he dropped the helmet and gave the audience a very intimate view of his private parts. Despite an unusual number of shocked elderly ladies present, the result was “the biggest round of applause I’ve ever had in my life.”
The anecdote followed a frank discussion of the actor’s once-fearless approach to nudity, which saw him stripping off in films as varied as Velvet Goldmine, The Pillow Book and Young Adam. Now 55, McGregor admitted that, if he were starting out today, in these times of intimacy coordinators, he might not be so bold. “We didn’t have social media in those days,” he mused. “It was much better. Nobody was screen-grabbing your naked ass.”
McGregor was in town partly to present a live commentary of his 1994 breakthrough film, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, but mostly because Scotland is where he lives now. Speaking to the Berlinale’s Artistic Director Tricia Tuttle, McGregor explained that his career had come full circle; though he continues working in the States, he has largely relocated to Perthshire where he hopes, like James McAvoy, to stimulate the arts scene in his home country. One of the first fruits of this endeavor will occur next year at the nearby Pitlochry Festival Theatre, where he will take to the stage with Alan Cumming for a version of Harry Macqueen’s 2020 film Supernova.
Discussing his passion for biking, McGregor revealed plans for more adventures in the Long Way Round documentary series, as well as a spinoff show following his attempts to cross the Atlantic in a renovated yacht. Though he accepted that he has probably “missed the boat” when it comes to playing James Bond in the rebooted Eon franchise, McGregor expressed his affection of the often-maligned Star Wars trilogy he appeared in and dropped heavy hints that he wasn’t done with his character, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Surprisingly, he said, he hadn’t jumped at the chance when Lucas first came to him. “Deciding to do it was hard,” he said. “I mean, it does sound like that’s not true, but it was. I remember phoning Danny [Boyle]. I phoned my uncle Dennis [Lawson]. I spoke to anybody that I respected about it, asking, ‘What do you think?’ Because at that point I was already doing these [artier] films in the early part of my career. I didn’t think of myself as being somebody in that kind of thing. And then the closer I got to it, the more I wanted to do it. But still, I did them, and they were hard because they’re not indie.
“It’s a different experience,” he continued. “You’re not really trying to find [the character’s interior life]. The job of an actor in those films is a very different one than The Pillow Book or something, when you’re really trying to discover someone’s emotional life. It’s different. So, I did them, and I enjoyed them, and they were not well received. And so that was weird and hard — to sort of put yourself into something like that, and then for them to be really dragged through the month by the critics. But I learned a lot about not giving a sh*t.”
McGregor, however, was pleasantly surprised, many years later, to find out that there actually is a passionate fanbase out there for his three Star Wars movies. “The truth is, I didn’t know that when we made the series [Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi]. I found that out later when they premiered the series. They showed it at a Star Wars convention in California. And I’d never been to one. I never went to conventions, or anything like that. But then when we went to the premiere, they played the first two episodes. I had many thousands of people behind me, and I felt a rush there. When I started signing autographs, I started meeting people who we made those films for: They were children when we made them. And then I started realizing that [those films] were loved.”
The actor still thinks fondly of Obi-Wan, partly because he is now getting closer to the age Alec Guinness was when he played the part in the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope. “He was in his 60s when he played that role, where I was doing it when I was 25, 26 or something like that. It was hard to make that work. But when I went back, I was in my late 40s.”
“I’d really like to do it again,” he added, “because at the end of the original series, me and Liam [Neeson] just wander off. There’s got to be a great story, or maybe two, or maybe three.” He laughed. “Or a series…”
