Ewan McGregor interview: Mr Sunshine vs the apocalypse

He’s turned 40, moved his family to Los Angeles and spends his time tinkering with motorbikes. Midlife crisis? No fear In the corner of his regular haunt, a bustling restaurant in the posh suburb of Brentwood, Los Angeles, Ewan McGregor takes a break from his shrimp salad to consider the apocalypse. “I’m not remotely worried,” he says. “For all of the hurtling towards climate change, there’s also a lot more understanding of it than there was when we were kids. They don’t call environmentalists tree huggers any more, so there’s hope!” Doomsday would be an odd fixation for McGregor. After all, life is rather good. He has five movies coming down the pipe, and promising ones, too. There’s Bryan Singer’s sword-swinging fantasy Jack the Giant Killer and The Impossible , in which he and Naomi Watts face the 2004 tsunami. He also plays a stuffy scientist who falls for Emily Blunt in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen , and he’s part of an all-star ensemble in Steven Soderbergh’s action thriller Haywire . But the first and most original film of this batch is Perfect Sense , a small Scottish indie about, among other things, the end of the world. It’s a trending topic this year – the end has seldom been so nigh. At the multiplex, humanity has been under more or less constant threat since January: from aliens ( Battle Los Angeles ), apes ( Rise of the Planet of the Apes ), asteroids ( Melancholia ) and now disease ( Contagion ). In Perfect Sense , McGregor plays a Glaswegian chef who falls in love with an epidemiologist (Eva Green) while they – and the rest of the human race – lose their senses one by one. First to go is smell, then taste, then hearing, with each loss preceded by a spell of extreme derangement: crippling grief, rabid hunger or violent rage. No explanation is given, no exception is made, and it’s not clear that anyone can stop it. It is quietly petrifying. “We get so many reactions to this film,” says McGregor. “Someone I know saw it in London recently and was fine until half an hour later, when she got the tube home. Then she just broke down crying. But I didn’t see it as the end of the world at all. When I read the script, I felt it was a really nicely written love story and the backdrop was a metaphor for falling in love. You know how we say that you lose your senses when you fall in love?” MCGregor’s own disposition is as sunny as the Los Angeles skies. He looks tanned and boyish in a faded T-shirt and jeans; his bicycle helmet is on the chair beside him (he lives just a couple of minutes away). He’s never been overly discouraged by the traditional portents of disaster, like climate change, bird flu and the return of Jersey Shore . “Ha ha! Yes, I’m hopeful, always have been. I’ve never had that fear of: ‘Oh my God, how can you bring kids into this world?’ I’m a much more positive person than that. I wouldn’t have wanted my parents not to have me because they thought like that, would I? Because, look – I’m having a great time!” This much is certainly true. Over a 20-year career spanning 46 movies, he has wielded a light sabre, shot heroin, fought wars and slept with countless beautiful women, and a few men, too. Life looked peachy at the turn of the millennium with the first Star Wars movie under his belt – followed by the huge success of Moulin Rouge . He went off around the world on a motorbike with his friend Charley Boorman in the Long Way Round . But when he returned, things took a bit of a dive. Star Wars didn’t launch him into a spangly new category of stardom. There followed a string of movies that underwhelmed critics and the box office – Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker , Miss Potter and Scenes of a Sexual Nature . Even when he worked with Woody Allen in Cassandra’s Dream , the film was universally panned. This year might be seen as a renaissance: since last year’s The Ghost Writer – the Robert Harris -scripted thriller directed by Roman Polanski – it seems that McGregor’s graph has begun to swing upwards once more. “But I would never draw a graph of my career,” points out McGregor. “I don’t look at things that way. On the vertical axis you could have box office, or personal satisfaction, and whenever you start thinking about that you never feel on top. There were films that were never seen by anyone but they were still important. Everything is a stepping stone. I’m sure my agents would be able to tell you exactly where I am on that graph, but I’m not sure that I want to know, really! The main thing is what’s next – the future.” He seems propelled by a simple sense of adventure. “I turned 40 in March,” he says. “But I don’t feel it – you never do. I still want to kick around on BMX bikes! I have to ask my wife: ‘Do I look like a cock, or is this all right, the way I’m dressed?’ Because you don’t want to be ‘that guy’, but you also don’t want to listen to that voice either. I want to wear skinny jeans when I’m in my 70s. Why not? Who cares?” According to David Mackenzie, the director of Perfect Sense , McGregor is “a delight”, but there’s “a complexity to him that isn’t just all sunny and eager. He’s more than just an all-round jack-the-lad good egg. He has his dark side.” Mackenzie would know. They first worked together on Young Adam in 2003, a tightly wrought noir about a cold-hearted drifter who engages in a series of loveless sexual encounters with Tilda Swinton and Emily Mortimer . McGregor recalls the experience with a

Posted by on October 1, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.