The hottest actor to shine light on the cinema in many a dark moon is hung over. He partied last night with the “Saturday Night Live” gang and the rockers from Oasis.
“I’m still asleep,” he says, burying his face in his folded arms on the table. But even half-asleep, you can see why Ewan McGregor is Scotland’s finest export since Glenlivet.
The star of “Shallow Grave,” “Trainspotting” and now a dark little comedy, the soon-to-open “A Life Less Ordinary,” has been crowned the once-and-future king.
Well, at least in showbiz terms. McGregor, with the spiky hair, bloodshot eyes and drop-dead grin, will step into Obi-Wan Kenobi’s baby shoes.
At least, he’ll play the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the new “Star Wars” prequel that has been fulminating in George Lucas’ mind since he conceived the series more than 20 years ago.
McGregor says he met the casting director for the new “Star Wars” two years ago. “Then a year later I met George Lucas and I screen-tested, then I got the job. It felt amazing to get a part in `Star Wars,’ my uncle was in all three.”
His uncle, Denis Lawson, was a bit player in the “Star Wars” trilogy, and an inspiration to young Ewan who lived in the tiny fishing village of Crieff.
“He would come up during the ’70s and wouldn’t be wearing shoes, had long hair and sheepskin waistcoats and I thought `Who was that weird guy?’ — so different from the people I was surrounded by.”
His interest in acting was piqued by this alien. “I think it was probably to do with that. I just wanted to be different as well.”
McGregor, 26, was toiling on another movie when his agent phoned to tell him he’d gotten the part of Obi-Wan. “I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody for a month. I told my wife and mum and dad, but I was not allowed to tell anybody at all till they had the cast in place.”
Ever since he was 9, McGregor says, he longed to be an actor. Crieff didn’t leave him much opportunity. So, at 16, he left home to work as a stagehand and gradually eased himself into acting roles.
The man who starred as one of the drugged-out losers in “Trainspotting” and pranced around in the altogether for “The Pillow Book,” plays a helpless janitor whose life explodes when he meets a ruthless rich girl (Cameron Diaz) in “A Life Less Ordinary.”
The film was made by the same writer, producer, director who did “Trainspotting” and “Shallow Grave.” But this is a romantic comedy with dollops of blood and mayhem.
McGregor thinks another reason he wanted to become an actor was because he was obsessed with the black-and-white movies of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s.
“Acting in those movies was always very straightforward and amazingly underplayed by blokes and overplayed by the ladies. And they were about very good stories, which seems to have been forgotten about these days,” he says.
McGregor, who hasn’t been out of work since he started, says the vertigo caused by sudden success is sometimes disorienting. “There are moments where it freaks you out completely. But when it happens, I’m always trying to figure out what it is that makes me anxious. It’s the same for me as it was before except, workwise, I’m in a very luxurious position where I’m working and still have films to make. That’s a very nice place to be.”
