Ewan McGregor

“I will do it Don Paolo.” The actor still fondly remembers that phrase, the first he uttered on celluloid, in Being Human , where he played a Portuguese sailor accompanying Robin Williams . Nothing foreshadowed then that he would become a teen icon with Trainspotting , that he would demonstrate his privileged voice in Moulin Rouge , and that he would inherit the role of Alec Guinness in the Star Wars saga . All these successes are nothing more than a symptom of the good personal and professional moment that the actor is going through, happily married to the production designer of Trainspotting, Eve Mouvrakis, with whom he has two daughters. She continues to live in London, and claims that she would never move to Los Angeles, because although she likes working in Hollywood, she couldn’t bear to live there. “I survive thanks to the fact that my wife and my daughter accompany me to all the shoots, otherwise I would have gone crazy,” she declared.

This enthusiastic Scottish patriot, born in Crieff, Perthsire, in 1971, will continue to provide reasons to spend money on cinema tickets or movie rentals in the coming months. It doesn’t stop, as he has starred in twenty feature films since in 1996, not so long ago, he became a world celebrity as Mark Renton, the leader of a gang of failed drug addicts in Trainspotting . It was followed by some titles as interesting as those already mentioned, or Touching the Wind , Black Hawk Down , Velvet Goldmine and Little Voice . Open Grave and A Different Story should also be cited, the other two titles he starred in by director Danny Boyle , producer Andrew McDonald and writer John McGregor, creators of Trainspotting , with whom he apparently had an argument when they were preparing The Beach .

AfterYoung Adam , a thriller about young lower-class Scots, and the comedy Down with Love , homage to the films by Doris Day and Rock Hudson , McGregor became a sort of modern Baron of Munchaussen, inTim Burton ‘s Big Fish . It is an adventure film about a man with a great imagination, William Bloom, who, when he falls ill with cancer, is visited by his son. Bloom will take advantage of the situation to tell him about the epic and mythological adventures that he supposedly has lived in the past. While McGregor is the young William Bloom who appears in his stories, Albert FinneyHe plays the same old character. There is no doubt that we are facing one of those well-intentioned but misunderstood freaks that Burton portrayed in his best films, such as Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood .

Then, instead of slacking off, McGregor continued to give Star Wars. In Revenge of the Sith, Obi Wan Kennobi, faced his pupil, Anakin Skywalker, seduced by the dark side. The actor got into the world of acting inspired by his uncle, Dennis Lawson, who played the pilot Wedge Antilles, in the first installments, for which he has always explained that he loves being in the saga, although he always complains about what complicated that is shooting with blue backgrounds. “I want to think that despite everything I’m good at doing it, although it doesn’t give me the same satisfaction as working with other actors.” The star recently wrapped up filming in Sydney, though the movie won’t be ready until after quite a lengthy post-production process, due to the sheer amount of special effects that need to be added. “I was dying to finish, to shave off the beard I was wearing, because it was starting to bother me,”

He did not stray far from fantastic cinema, since right after he starred in Michael Bay ‘s The Island , where he was one of the inhabitants of an aseptic place in 2019, when the Earth’s atmosphere has theoretically become unbreathable. After playing an editor in Miss Potter , and putting himself under the command of Woody Allen , McGregor has just finished filming The Tourist , a thriller that pairs him with Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams .

And what has McGregor done afterwards? Starting to shoot another movie by the hand of Marc Forster , responsible for Monster’s Ball . In Transit , where he co-stars with Naomi Watts and Bob Hoskins , he becomes a teacher trying to save the life of one of his students, about to commit suicide. His name has also been mentioned along with that of Hugh Jackman, as a possible candidate to replace Pierce Brosnanas the next James Bond, although he has not revealed if he would accept the role, because he would have to think about it if there were an offer from the producers. “Probably shooting so many movies so closely is not the best working method for an actor. But I don’t know how to say no when they offer me a good script. The only solution to stop shooting so many movies would be to stop reading scripts”, he explained.