Ewan McGregor is beaming behind the wheel of his rusty 1960-something Volkswagen pickup in the parking lot of The Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. A left and then a few blocks and then one more left on South Main Street, and he’s at yet another parking lot, this one deserted for the day’s shoot. Still sporting the tailored navy suit and brown tie from the last few frames shot in the hotel, he’s quickly out of the battered VW and ogling one of the day’s props, the photographer’s midnight blue 1964 Mustang, the one with the tiny little side-view mirrors that look like they belong on a dentist’s tray, and the missing “D” on the hood that renders its make “FOR.”
McGregor’s fondness for motor sports is well documented. A known gearhead, he has twice in the last decade embarked on cross-continental motorcycle trips — one around the northern hemisphere and one down the length of Africa. Both were broadcast as miniseries. On this day, he has his vintage Spanish test bike, another of the shoot’s props, lashed down in the bed of the pickup. He is still grinning when he takes the bike down the ramp, and later when a neighbor leans out a window to complain about its apparent lack of a muffler.
A day earlier, in the Spanish-style back patio of a Santa Monica café, no muscle cars or motorcycles or other toys in sight, that McGregor smile, the one he deploys with a glance to the middle distance when he makes sort of Zen pronouncements about his life or career, is on frequent display. Somewhere between content and amused, it is what a screenwriter might call a “knowing smile.”
It’s there when he offers, in his still-detectable Scottish lilt, his take on his family’s move three years ago to Los Angeles: “I always just assumed that I’d live in London forever. But I don’t, and I quite enjoy that.” Or his decision just more than a decade ago to quit drinking: “It was effortless, because it was the only thing I was prepared to give up. I wasn’t prepared to give up my career or my child — I wasn’t about to lose my children... 11 years. Easy-peasy.”
Or artifice in film, a favorite topic of disdain: “I hate scripts that read like other movies....That’s why I’ve never really nailed the Hollywood ‘hard man’ role, because I don’t really believe it. I don’t know guys who have great exit lines every time they leave the room.”
And later, in a discussion of his long résumé of sex scenes: “I love it when scriptwriters write, ‘They climax together,’ and I go, Oh yeah, really?” McGregor’s is the look of a man at total peace with how much he has figured out. And at 40 — more than half a decade removed from the Star Wars prequels and Moulin Rouge and that moment when there was a chance at all-out global megastardom — McGregor seems to have quite a bit figured out.
Yes, Ewan McGregor, who made his star turn 15 years ago as a nihilist junkie in Trainspotting, who always seemed willing to wear eyeliner and go full frontal, is 40. Though over tea, he doesn’t quite look it. Los Angeles has rendered his complexion a shade tanner than a son of Crieff, Scotland, should be capable of, and he’s dressed young: light-washed Levi’s, black leather Chuck Taylors and a black T-shirt with an elaborate Rorschach screen print. But when conversation turns to getting his teenage daughter to join the family for a shoot in London last summer, he doesn’t just sound middle-aged. He sounds like any other slightly harassed dad in the subdivision.
“We can’t really drag her out of L.A. anymore, not with a team of wild horses,” he says with a laugh.
He’s been married to his wife, Ève, a production designer he met early in his career, for 16 years. The couple have four girls, ranging in age from 1 to 15. Over the years, he’s been largely guarded about his family life, but in conversation, he tends to define himself as much as a father as an actor.
“I’ve tried very hard to keep them out of the way, because it’s nothing to do with anybody, and it’s not fair on them,” he says. “We have a group of friends where some are in the business, some are not in the business — and all walks of the business: a lawyer, a writer, a director we know — and their kids and our kids are all friends. It’s not some kind of showbiz party around our house on the weekends. It’s far from it. It’s like real life.”
At times McGregor’s low-key cool and motorcycles and downright sane approach to the fame-family divide seem of another era. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and Westport come to mind.
Take, for example, an aside he offers about Haywire, which is in theaters Jan. 20 and is the ostensible reason for our sit-down. Helmed by Steven Soderbergh, the international spy thriller stars Gina Carano as an agent on the run, and McGregor as one of several GQ-ready spooks — played by Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum — who either employ or are out to extinguish her. Soderbergh, McGregor explains, put the cast at the preproduction mercy of a former Israeli special agent, who had them all packing fake blue .9 mm pistols to set the level of paranoia just right.
“I didn’t take my gun anywhere... I don’t want to be that guy who’s getting drawn on in the supermarket, when I’ve got my kids around, because I’ve got a rubber gun down the back of my pants,” he says, cracking up. “I kind of chickened out of it... Well, I got the point.”
Getting the point seems to be a McGregor specialty, and why not? He has been working for almost 20 years and has 50-something films to his credit. He is presumably set financially (though he refuses to take the bait when the subject of a back end on Obi-Wan Kenobi action figures is broached: “It wouldn’t be gentlemanly to talk about that”). He’s taken on a variety of work since, including a few that didn’t quite land as intended. If something less than megastardom followed that early-Naughts hot streak, McGregor seems perfectly at ease where he is now. He’s been on a bit of a new streak lately, which started in 2010 with Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer and continued last year with Mike Mills’ terrific Beginners, in which he played an angst-ridden, grief-stricken thirtysomething casting about Los Angeles with Mélanie Laurent and a Jack Russell terrier.
He has, in short, achieved the sort of work-life balance that would be maddening to the world at large if he didn’t tend to be such a goddamn nice guy about the whole thing. Unprompted, he twice rearranges the proceedings at the café to keep a very pale, very sweaty reporter out of the baking SoCal sun. He pitches the umbrella himself on the second go-round.
“[It’s] almost unnervingly natural, how relaxed he is,” says Carano. A mixed martial artist by training and a total acting novice before Haywire, she has a unique perspective on the matter.
“He’s so smart. Everyone else was so excited, and he’s just relaxed and cool and has all the smart, witty things to say, but he’s kind of quieter,” she says, recalling the cast’s first meeting in a hotel. “And then we all went downstairs and I see this guy take off on his motorcycle — the coolest, most antique motorcycle — and it was Ewan. I was like, ‘That’s Ewan McGregor.’ He’s just way too cool.”
Haywire and Beginners aside, McGregor is moving toward more familiar domestic territory on-screen these days. He’ll play, as he puts it, “a proper dad” in this year’s The Impossible, about a family upended by the tsunami in Thailand in 2004. Despite his being a father for nearly as long as he’s been working, it’s something of a first.
“It’s nice to feel like you’re working on grown-up films and playing a grown-up person,” he says of the development.
In March, he’s especially against type as a buttoned-up Scottish fisheries expert in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Lasse Hallström, the Swedish-born director of Chocolat and The Cider House Rules, who worked with McGregor on Salmon Fishing, cites the actor’s “sense of irony” as one of his greatest strengths. “Privately, he has a wonderful sense of humor,” the director says.
At the café, McGregor considers what’s left to accomplish. He says he’d like to direct, unaware of or, more likely, unbothered by the cliché. But acting, he says, is still an end itself.
“If every now and again one’s like a step out, that’s fine,” McGregor says of his role selection these days. “I’d like to feel I’m still climbing the ladder, if you like, but at the same time, it’s not the be-all and end-all. Because I’m really happy where I’m at.”
By now McGregor’s tea bag is on the glass tabletop, and the sun is starting to let up a little bit. It’s the time of day when, one imagines, the dutiful parents of the L.A. metro area line up their cars for the post-school pickup. Or maybe it’s the perfect hour or two to be on a bike, tooling around Southern California. Either way, our allotted time is drawing to a close and McGregor is soon back off to the real world.
But not without one last bit of insight.
“Your ambition,” he says with that smile, “can be to carry on doing what you’re doing.”
Ewan McGregor talks about working with Director Steven Soderbergh, Gina Carano, his character and the relationship between Kenneth and Mallory in this sit down interview.
Ewan talks about how he got involved in Haywire, his feelings on not being involved in more of the action scenes, karaoke, does he prefer two takes or fifty, and which of his previous movies do people always want to talk to him about. In addition, McGregor talked about starring in Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Killer which arrives this summer.
One thing is clear from Buzzine’s sit-down with Ewan McGregor: when Steven Soderbergh asks you to be in his film, you say “yes.” With a résumé including such cinematic gems as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Traffic and Contagion, Soderbergh has won the awe and respect of his peers in the industry. With his latest film, Haywire, he follows a double-crossed spy as she struggles to survive and get back at those who betrayed her. McGregor discusses the grueling fight scenes, working with mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, and what a rare joy it is to be in a film with a strong female lead.
How were you informed about the movie and Carano’s role in it? How were you sold on the movie?
The script was very, very strong. It was a really good piece of writing. It had good strong elements from, obviously, fight movies, which I am not familiar with particularly. There was a spy element: what it is like to be an undercover spy — James Bond. And at the center of it is this incredible strong female lead, which is unusual in a film like this, I think. So it was very intriguing, and for me personally, the opportunity to work with Steven was very strong. He’s a filmmaker who, I think, is on all of our lists, in terms of people you really want to work with.
Did you ever fear for your life going toe-to-toe with Gina?
No, not at all. We were in very safe hands with Gina because she’s so precise. I really never felt there was ever an issue or worry to get hurt. I didn’t feel like that. The only time I did get hurt was when I accidentally punched Gina in the head. I had three punches. One, two, and the third punch had to go right over Gina’s head and I messed it up. I punched her solidly right in the side of her head, and she came straight up to me and said, “Are you okay?” And I was trying to be very butch, “Yeah, I’m fine,” but I had broken three fingers, and Gina didn’t feel a thing. We were in very safe hands. The only scary thing is Gina’s fitness is just unbelievable. Because I watched her do some of the fight scenes in New Mexico with stunt men, and they would do a take, and at the end of the take, Steven would say “cut,” and the stuntmen were, like, destroyed. They would be like [heavy breathing noise], sweating, and Gina would be like, “All right, ready for another take?” We were doing a fight in sand. My fitness is not very great. My worry was more about being able to keep going through the day. It was a long day.
Was there any worry about this being her first lead? Did you help her, give her any acting tips?
No, there wasn’t any worry about it, not at all. We did our first scene together in Spain — Barcelona, which was then reshot. We had a very long scene. It was the scene that takes place in Gina’s apartment in San Diego, when I go ask her to go to Ireland. It was going to be placed after the job was finished in Barcelona, then I go to Barcelona to meet her. We had this long walk down the staircase, all one shot, ’til we walk over to this hand rail which reveals all of Barcelona below. It was a lot of dialogue and there was no cut, so we had to get it right from start to finish, and she just nailed it over and over again. It was never a worry.
Did you have to overcome the idea of hitting a woman?
I think my fight is very different. I’m fighting for my life. So, as Channing is instigating it, I didn’t have the same because I’m defending. My Kenneth would not really, in reality, have lasted that long. So I didn’t feel like that. I did note that it was a very different experience than the fights I’ve had with other guys, because what’s missing is the bullshit masculine. There’s always an element of that when you’re pretending to fight with another stunt guy or another actor. That was missing, and what was left was this great care for each other and working together with that removed. And that was lovely. I thought it was great.
But it is different, don’t you think? Because you’re in there and throw the coffee, and lay into her in a violent way. And my fight was kind of more about “get me out of here.” In fact, to the point where he turns and runs and tries to climb an unclimb-able cliff. Poor old Kenneth.
What did you guys learn from her that you weren’t expecting?
I just never felt that I was working with somebody that was doing their first job. I knew that going in, and then it never crossed my mind really. I felt there was a complete ease, working together. So it was seamless really. It never crossed my mind.
How do you choose such a variety of movies and roles to be in?
There are a lot of factors, I suppose, but the most important thing is the script. The story. That has to come above and beyond any other factor when I decide to make a film, because I have to be connected to it. When you’re reading a great novel and you don’t want the book to end, I want that feeling when I read the script. And I want to see myself in the character that I am reading for, by the time I get to the end of the script. If those things happen and you feel a connection, the other factors come in. Who’s directing it? But if you don’t have a feeling reading it for the first time, from experience, it won’t come later. So it comes from that. And because that’s the way I choose films, they are all different with different people. That’s what I love about it. You get this opportunity to dip into different people’s lives, and each film’s set has a different atmosphere and different heart. So they are all different, and I love that about it.
Ewan and Ève made a lovely couple as they walked down the red carpet at last night’s Golden Globes Awards.
Ewan’s co-star in Beginners, Christopher Plummer, won the Best Actor award Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for the same film. In accepting his award, Plummer was playful to his co-star, Ewan McGregor, who acted the role of his son, Oliver, in the film, as well as to writer and director Mike Mills.
“I want to salute my partner, Ewan — that wily Scott — Ewan ‘my heart’s in the highlands’ McGregor. That scene-stealing swine from the Outer Hebrides,” Plummer told the audience gathered for the Hollwood Foreign Press Association’s annual awards. “Also, a 21-gun salute goes to Michael Mills, whose talent and wisdom made Beginners such an enchantingly human story.”
Boorman and McGregor planning another Long Way Down?
16 January 2012 By Visordown News
Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman are talking about a third motorcycle adventure, according to Boorman.
In an interview on Saturday Morning Kitchen, Boorman talked about his motorcycle adventures with actor-pal McGregor and said that the duo were in discussion about a third adventure follow-up to Long Way Round and Long Way Down.
The pair hit the headlines in 2004 when they started off on their Long Way Round motorcycle adventure, riding east from London to New York. In 2007, the pair's next trip was called Long Way Down, where they rode from Scotland to South Africa.
Since the Long Way episodes, Boorman has filmed By Any Means and Extreme Frontiers. In By Any Means, Boorman headed from Ireland to Australia, using any transport available. The program often showed Boorman freaking out when locals tried to make him to anything slightly off-track. In Extreme Frontiers, Boorman heads across Canada on his motorcycle and suffers a panic attack when diving in Lake Huron. Karl Pilkington, eat your heart out.
Here’s a nice new UK trailer courtesy of Lionsgate for Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt’s new movie, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. We saw a US theatrical trailer for the movie just before Christmas and although this trailer has the same intro dialogue, it give us rather a lot more footage. Blunt and McGregor star alongside Kristin Scott, Amr Waked, Catherine Steadman and Tom Mison. It’s directed by Lasse Hallström and we can expect to see it 9th March.
Spend time chatting with successful actors and you’ll hear all manner of serious talk about how hard it was to commit to a certain role and the deep, dark places plumbed in service of nailing it. Ewan McGregor, 40, is not like that. He likes to work, he works a lot and he finds satisfaction in the many roles he’s landed over the years, if not loads of personal drama. Currently, he has five movies in play: Perfect Sense, The Impossible, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Jack the Giant Killer and Haywire.
In Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, out this month, McGregor portrays a private military contractor of execrable moral fiber who betrays one of his chief assets — a gorgeous assassin played by Gina Carano — triggering an epic confrontation. But while several of the films McGregor has made lately concern skullduggery and calamity, he’s not feeling particularly dour himself. He’s a happy guy, living in L.A. with his family and maintaining a stable of the kinds of classic motorcycles you work on as often as you ride.
Born in Crieff, Scotland, McGregor dropped out of high school at 16 and enrolled at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. After some dues-paying, he broke through in 1996’s Trainspotting; since then he’s convincingly portrayed Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels, a love-struck poet in Moulin Rouge and the loyal if conflicted son of a man who came out late in life in Beginners — in addition to 40-odd other roles over 20 years.
McGregor has a reputation as a low-maintenance actor, a working man among divas. We talked about Haywire, his taste in motorcycles, his unfortunate inability to fake a punch and how, um, “fate” changed his life.
HEMISPHERES: How is it that you have five movies coming out this year? Have you mastered some sort of cloning technology?
MCGREGOR: It’s just kind of the way it went. They aren’t coming out all at the same time, but there are quite a few of them. I’ve been working a lot and now I’m taking a break.
HEMISPHERES: In Haywire, you play a guy who’s a pretty nasty piece of work.
MCGREGOR: Yeah, we based it on somebody who shall remain nameless.
HEMISPHERES: Give us some hints.
MCGREGOR: You just have to look at the haircut. It’s somebody in the private security business. That’s all I will say.
HEMISPHERES: Wow, now you really sound like a spy. What was it like working with Steven Soderbergh?
MCGREGOR: He’s so relaxed making a film. He’s made so many that he just knows what he’s doing. He sits on the dolly, lights the scene, rehearses the scene, looks into the camera and then shoots the scene. Seven or eight takes would go by without very much direction from him. Then something would happen, the scene would shift somehow, and he’d simply say, “Let’s move on.” It was as if he was waiting for that thing to happen on its own, without forcing it in any way. I’ve wanted to work with him for a long time. We almost did Once Upon a Time together but it didn’t work out. It was lovely that he came back to me with this. I just liked it; I thought it was really an interesting idea — and complicated, like a lot of his work.
HEMISPHERES: Haywire sort of harkens back to the classic spy movies.
MCGREGOR: It reminded me of the Bond films, with the idea of this private soldier/special agent whose boss turns on her. I was trying to play the kind of guy who provides violence for a fee, who puts people in harm’s way and doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he makes money.
HEMISPHERES: He ends up paying a price, though. Speaking of which: What’s it like to get beaten up by a girl?
MCGREGOR: Gina Carano is unbelievable. I watched her really destroy some stunt guys. Her usual job [as a world-class mixed martial arts fighter] is to hit people, so I think it was hard for her to get used to not actually hitting them. But she ended up doing amazing work. She was very careful with me. There was a sequence of three punches we had to do where I punched with the right and then with the left and then I swept right, directly over her head. She was supposed to duck but didn’t quite, and I hit her right in the head. She grabbed me and said, “Are you OK?” She didn’t feel a thing. I almost broke my finger. How many times do you punch someone in the head and have them ask you if you’re all right?
HEMISPHERES: I’m not answering that. You’ve worked with some great directors, a list that includes Roman Polanski, Baz Luhrmann, Danny Boyle and Woody Allen. Not a bad run you’ve had.
MCGREGOR: Sometimes when you’re on the set you have to pinch yourself. You look across and Woody Allen is sitting there giving you nods. Or, like you said, Polanski. It’s incredible. I love it.
HEMISPHERES: Do they have anything in common, the great ones you’ve worked for?
MCGREGOR: I think they have a vision. A lot of directors for hire can make films for studios, and make films the way other people want them to be made. The great ones can’t do that. They can only make the film that they want to make.
HEMISPHERES: Are you finally taking a break now?
MCGREGOR: I’ve got some publicity to do, but I’m at home with my family. It’s nice. I get a chance to be at home and ride my motorbikes.
HEMISPHERES: Which bike is currently your favorite?
MCGREGOR: Probably the three early-’70s Moto Guzzis are the ones I ride the most. They’re sort of old and industrial. A lot of people don’t like them, but I really do. I have one that looks like it’s just been pulled out of a river — it looks terrible, but actually it can beat most people away from the lights. I love riding old bikes because it’s satisfying keeping them going, and you can be nostalgic about who might have ridden them before you.
HEMISPHERES: Let’s talk a little bit about how you got started as an actor. If your uncle Denis Lawson hadn’t been in the business, you might not have ever left your hometown.
MCGREGOR: My Uncle Denis — I recently worked with him in this film Perfect Sense that’s coming out. It’s the first time I’ve gotten to act with him. I grew up watching him. He’s my real inspiration, and I can absolutely see his acting in mine. Sometimes I’ll call him up and say, “I just saw me doing you in a movie!”
HEMISPHERES: And your parents were fine with your quitting school and following in his footsteps?
MCGREGOR: Yeah, I was 16 when I left, and I was working in the Perth Repertory Theatre a week later. I was one of the stage crew putting up the sets, but they would give me little walk-on parts. I was suddenly working somewhere that embodied all my dreams and all my hopes, working with professional actors and being part of the magic. It was great. It was like coming home for me. I thought it was where I belonged.
HEMISPHERES: Not to be reductionist about it, but you’re especially well known for a couple of things: one, your willingness to disrobe for roles, beginning with Trainspotting, and two, the fact that you don’t drink.
MCGREGOR: I’ve never believed that you need to live a chaotic life in order to be a great actor. I used to live that kind of life, and I was good at my job, but I just sort of scraped by. Now, I feel like I’ve got more control over it, more choice. But you’re right. Most of the stories now boil down to the fact that I don’t drink and the suggestion that I’m naked all the time. I’m the naked sober guy.
HEMISPHERES: I’ve read that you’re willing to watch your films but you hate watching or reading your interviews. Is that true?
MCGREGOR: Yes, I find it really embarrassing. I was walking down the street in London last week and there’s a magazine that the homeless people sell called The Big Issue, and on the front cover it said, “Ewan Tells Us How Fate Changed His Life.” I had forgotten I even did that interview. It’s embarrassing, the idea that I’m on this magazine cover telling the world how fate changed my life. But I love being in the movies, I’ve wanted to be in the movies since I was a kid, and there’s still a part of me that looks up at the big screen and says, “Wow, I’m in that movie — that’s amazing!” I still get a buzz out of it.
David Carr, who covers media and culture for the New York Times, prefers vintage bikes with pedals.
The 40-year-old actor - who raises four daughters, Clara, 15, Esther, 10, Jamiyan, 10 and a 12-month-old baby whose name has not been disclosed, with wife Ève - thinks it would be a “perfect” existence to divide his time between creating works of art and being with his family.
Asked what he would do if he ever gave up acting, he said: “I like the idea of being a sculptor. Just me alone, making something - that solitary existence. And then you come out and you’re back into the house with all the kids. That would be perfect.”
Despite living in an all-female household, Ewan insists he never finds his domestic situation overwhelming.
He told the new issue of America’s GQ magazine: “I never feel battered by it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Ewan - who has travelled across the globe for a variety of TV shows - recently revealed he plans to take some time out from work and would like to take up a new hobby during his break.
He said: “It’s difficult to reconcile going way on my own for four months. So I don’t have any plans to do any more at the moment - although I’m quite fascinated with South America. I really want to start paragliding. It’s the closest one can get to being a bird and it’s all natural. In the next few months I’m going to look into this.”
January 2012 By Devin Gordon, photograph by Peggy Sirota
There’s no good reason to dislike Ewan McGregor, so here’s a really petty one: He’s one of those annoyingly unflappable guys who can stuff their life to the brim and carry it off like it’s a fleck of dust on their shoulder. He works constantly. Always has. In the sixteen years since he made his toilet-spelunking splash as a raffish junkie in Trainspotting, McGregor has been in thirty-eight films. He’ll star in three during the first six months of 2012, and there’s a fourth—a 3-D version of The Phantom Menace—that he claims not to have known about. “They’re actually going to rerelease it into the cinema?” he asks. “Well, that’s interesting.”
Add to that work schedule a packed personal life: The 40-year- old Scotsman is the father of four girls, and he seems genuinely taken aback by the suggestion that it could ever get overwhelming. “I never feel battered by it,” he says. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
The battering he saves for on-screen. His first film in 2012 is Haywire, an enjoyably scuzzy, cold-blooded action flick directed by Steven Soderbergh. Aside from the fun of “getting my head kicked in,” he took the part for the chance to work with Soderbergh before the director makes good on his recent threats to retire from filmmaking. And if the actor were to follow suit and walk away from movies? “I like the idea of being a sculptor. Just me alone, making something—that solitary existence.” At last, the buried wish for a respite from life’s mayhem! But no: “And then you come out,” he adds, “and you’re back into the house with all the kids. That would be perfect.”
Ewan McGregor was forced to abandon plans for his directorial debut when he discovered someone else was making a film based on his boat race idea.
The Trainspotting star was researching a 1968 yacht race for a movie he was hoping to make with his wife Ève Mavrakis when he learned the film was already in production.
He tells Nylon Guys magazine, “My wife was going to design it. I wasn’t going to be in it. And then I found out someone else is doing it. I was gutted.”
But the disappointment hasn’t thwarted McGregor’s director dreams: “I think it would be so fascinating and satisfying, but I don’t pretend... I would be starting right at the bottom.”
Relativity Media has provided ComingSoon.net with an exclusive sneak peek at the new TV spot for Steven Soderbergh's action-thriller Haywire, starring American Gladiators and Mixed Martial Arts star Gina Carano as Mallory, a special ops agent who finds a target on her back once she’s outlived her use to the agency.
The film co-stars Ewan McGregor as Mallory’s direct superior and Michael Douglas and Antonio Banderas as higher ups at the agency, while Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender play fellow field agents. Michael Angarano plays Scott, a young man Mallory picks up while on the run. As you can tell from the spot, it’s a fairly action-packed film, but it also reunites Soderbergh with Lem Dobbs, screenwriter of The Limey, and David Holmes, who did the music for all three Ocean’s 11 movies.
Film charity MediCinema is holding a Star Wars charity dinner & quiz at London’s Hilton Park Lane Hotel on February 2, to coincide with the release of Episode I - The Phantom Menace in 3D.
All proceeds will go to MediCinema charity which installs state-of-the-art cinemas in hospitals for patients and families. The plan is to build new facilities in three hospitals in London in 2012.
A selection of Star Wars-loving celebrities will form the top table and guests will take them on to compete to win the title of MediCinema Star Wars Quiz champions.
Patrons of MediCinema include Ewan McGregor who starred as the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy and Nick Frost and Simon Pegg who are both avid Star Wars fans.
“We are enormously excited about the potential of this event being a great platform for the MediCinema charity and want to grow this into a signature, annual event. The cult and history of Star Wars and its community provide a real opportunity for the world of film to have a positive, significant impact in the world of charity,” said MediCinema’s chief executive Stephen Moore.
The very first trailer and poster for Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Killer have debuted at iTunes Trailers. Check them both out below!
The film tells the story of an ancient war that is reignited when a young farmhand unwittingly opens a gateway between our world and a fearsome race of giants. Unleashed on the Earth for the first time in centuries, the giants strive to reclaim the land they once lost, forcing the young man, Jack, into the battle of his life to stop them. Fighting for a kingdom, its people, and the love of a brave princess, he comes face to face with the unstoppable warriors he thought only existed in legend—and gets the chance to become a legend himself.
Starrring Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ian McShane, Bill Nighy and Ewan McGregor, Jack the Giant Killer hits theaters in 2D, 3D and IMAX 3D on June 15, 2012.
Ewan McGregor talks Beginners and gay roles: “I’m interested in sexuality and sex, relationships and love and what makes us tick.”
Sun, Dec 4 2011 By Greg Hernandez
It’s great to see the terrific film Beginners getting some awards attention. It’s the story of a father (Christopher Plummer) and son (Ewan McGregor) and what happens when the father comes out late in life.
McGregor talked to Frontiers IN LA about the movie, his popularity with gay audiences and more. Here is an excerpt:
In Beginners, your character goes through a process that’s almost like a rediscovery of his father when Christopher Plummer’s character comes out at the age of 75. Did you personally discover anything about the gay community through the making of the film that you hadn’t known beforehand?
I learned a lot about American gay history, because I think Mike [Mills, the film’s director] really beautifully explores it in the montages where he’s looking back at his father’s life as a young gay man in the early ‘50s, with an aim to try to understand what that might be like and why his father made the choices that he made. He makes it very real, that history, and it doesn’t feel like a history lesson. It’s an exploration of his dad’s younger years. And then how not very long ago gay men were being thrown into the back of police trucks and arrested for going to gay coffee shops. That sort of stuff I found very interesting—how recently it happened, when it seems so long ago.
You’re a very popular actor among the gay community for many reasons, but primarily because you appear in films and roles that really speak to gay men. How do you choose which roles you take on?
Well, it’s just a very gut process really. I’m not very complicated about it—if I find a script I don’t want to put down and I like that it’s firing my imagination and I start to see myself in that role, and it’s about something I’m interested to talk about, then I’ll do it. It’s kinda as simple as that really. I try not to make it anymore complicated than that.
Occasionally it does [get more complicated]—I suppose the more you do it, the more you start thinking about directors. You know, I’ve made a lot of films, and you start thinking, “Well OK, now I want to make really good films.” You try to narrow down the possibilities of them not being good, so I suppose nowadays I take more note about the directors. But then again, if I love a script and it’s a first-time director, I’ll probably still do it because that first-time director is probably firing at 110 percent.
In regards to the gay community and myself, I’m delighted, but I’m just interested in people and life. I’m interested in sexuality and sex, relationships and love and what makes us tick, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s heterosexual or gay romance. I don’t really mind it, I just find it interesting. I’ve never really gone out to try to play a gay person, because I don’t really believe you could do that, and if you did, it wouldn’t be a very good portrayal of anybody. So I go out to play a person, and their sexuality is a part of what makes them up—of course, it’s a very important part of what makes us up, but it’s not everything—it’s not.
Steven Soderbergh’s new action/thriller, Haywire, could be his most ferocious, full-bore movie to date. And if he carries through his threat to retire from filmmaking, it may just stay that way - unless, of course, Liberace goes postal in his upcoming HBO biopic.
This punchy new quad gives a flavour of what to expect from the pic: ie bullets, a lot of broken glass, some seriously worried looking dudes, and a few more bullets for good measure. Someone has stitched Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) up and someone is going to pay. To be honest, we’re looking at you, Mr. Banderas, with your roguish moustache and experience on Spy Kids.
Carano’s character is a black-ops “super soldier” who goes off the grid and hits back at the CIA handlers who betrayed her and are threatening her family. Soderbergh’s strong-looking cast is rounded out by Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas and Bill Paxton, a more-than-decent blend of character acting talent and action chops.
The Limey writer Lem Dobbs reunited with Soderbergh on scripting duties, which should guarantee a DVD commentatory worth owning.
Ewan McGregor has joined the cast of the HBO drama pilot The Corrections, the cable outlet confirms to TheWrap. McGregor will play Chip, the younger son of an elderly Midwestern couple trying to draw all of their children home for one last Christmas together.
The pilot, based on the Jonathan Franzen novel, is written by Noah Baumbach and Franzen and produced by Scott Rudin. In the book, Chip is a writer and academic who gets mixed up with a Lithuanian crime boss.
McGregor joins a cast that already includes Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest as the parents.
Still to be cast are the roles of their older son, a suburbanite overwhelmed by his wife and children, and their daughter, who flees her marriage only to end up in an affair with a married man.
Ewan McGregor is beaming behind the wheel of his rusty 1960-something Volkswagen pickup in the parking lot of The Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. A left and then a few blocks and then one more left on South Main Street, and he’s at yet another parking lot, this one deserted for the day’s shoot. Still sporting the tailored navy suit and brown tie from the last few frames shot in the hotel, he’s quickly out of the battered VW and ogling one of the day’s props, the photographer’s midnight blue 1964 Mustang, the one with the tiny little side-view mirrors that look like they belong on a dentist’s tray, and the missing “D” on the hood that renders its make “FOR.”
Or artifice in film, a favorite topic of disdain: “I hate scripts that read like other movies....That’s why I’ve never really nailed the Hollywood ‘hard man’ role, because I don’t really believe it. I don’t know guys who have great exit lines every time they leave the room.”
He has, in short, achieved the sort of work-life balance that would be maddening to the world at large if he didn’t tend to be such a goddamn nice guy about the whole thing. Unprompted, he twice rearranges the proceedings at the café to keep a very pale, very sweaty reporter out of the baking SoCal sun. He pitches the umbrella himself on the second go-round.
