TUNBRIDGE WELLS
Film: Trainspotting (1996)
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“To go to see Star Wars for the first time when you are seven at the cinema is quite a big deal anyway. The fact that he was in it made it especially cool. He survived all three movies but I can remember asking him about it. I always got the sense from him it was like two weeks work at Shepperton Studios, and I understood it wasn’t that big a deal to him compared to some of his other work. Now I can understand that!” Ewan’s current success may have something to do with the fact that his mother allowed him to drop out of school at 16. Was it a case of just getting out, or was acting the impetus to leave?
“I wouldn’t want to talk about that. I would never want to talk about my marriage and the tabloids at the same time, in the same breath, to tell you the truth. There’s always been media interest and therefore public interest in the lives of actors and stars, though. “I’m sure there wouldn’t have been all those stories in Hollywood in the 1940s and ’50s of gay actors being in fake marriages and stuff if that hadn’t been the case. So there’s always been this idea of a public interest in what stars’ lives are like but I don’t know if it’s ever been to the extent it is now.”
“I couldn’t see that I was learning anything that was of any relevance to me,” he admits. “Now I see I was wrong. There’s a lot I could have got from school that I didn’t. At the time, though, I didn’t really get the point, didn’t get the basic idea about education that this might be of any use to me later on.
But isn’t he relatively well removed from that world now?
“Now whether that’s because my teachers didn’t instil that into me or whether I just completely focussed on becoming an actor or that I didn’t bother, I don’t know but certainly when I got the chance to leave it was like an opportunity. Getting out of school was a huge relief to me.”
“Think of Britney Spears in America who is a victim of it, for example. I was so sickened by those pictures a few years back of hundreds and hundreds of photographers outside her house, and an ambulance trying to get through, trying to get through the paparazzi, trying to get to her home. I felt so ashamed of the human race; people can be so irresponsible.”
The Scottish actor is notoriously protective of his family and the documentary Long Way Round was one of the first times that the McGregor family has been shown off to the world media. Perhaps it’s because Ewan and his wife, Eve, don’t go looking for attention that the tabloids now generally leave them alone. Ewan is cagey on the subject:
“Yeah,” he agrees. “I mean what can you do about sections of the media that base stories on ‘actors without make up: see how s**t they look in real life!’? That’s just appalling.
Whether he stays out of the tabloids in the future remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure; with reports of Long Way Down circling the internet, and a handful of films in the production stage, Ewan certainly won’t be dropping off our radar any time soon. 62
NOVEMBER 2010
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