| Guardian Unlimited page 2: As it happens, a friend of mine, Micko Westmoreland, plays an important character in the film, a kind of Fey Mute Spirit of Glam Rock called Jack Fairy. In real life, Micko is a musician, a one man techno act called The Bowling Green, and he was the one who commented that Ewan didn't seem like a famous person. He said of Ewan's pop performance: 'On-stage, you realised just how much he's worth. There was a stunt man, but Ewan wouldn't use him, he dived through a wall of fire, he writhed around naked, he did all the singing himself, he didn't have to, he just got up there and did it. He has a lot of, erm, raw male energy.' But not an awful lot of singing talent. There is a classic scene where Curt Wild is in the studio, singing rawly, malely, energetically, craply (to be fair, he is meant to be bad). 'I thought it was good that I sang!' howls Ewan, defensively. 'It was a brilliant idea.' Would you like to be a rock star? 'No. I'd be dead. I find it hard enough to stop myself now. . . The relentless touring, the buggering about, the endless parties, the fuelled consumption from the endless parties, performing in front of thousands of people. . . if I did that for more than a week, I'd sink into a terrible depression. We have rock stars for a reason, we need them to do it for us.' Would you say you were too sensible to be a rock star? 'Oh yes. I'm not tucked up in bed by midnight. . . But I feel shit the next day after I'm drunk and I don't go out and drink vodka for breakfast. I have it for lunch, aha. But I must say,' niggles Ewan, still miffed by the notion that he can't sing, 'I was quite musical at school. I've got French horn to Grade 7, I did a couple of concertos, and I played in the school pipe band as a side drummer. Quite a good one, if I say so myself. I was tip that's the lead drummer and my dad had been lead drummer before, and my uncle also. I won the drumming cup!' OK, OK. Other McGregor musical credentials: Ewan had his own rock band when he was 15, called Scarlet Pride. He put red poster paint in his hair and bandannas round his knees and wrote a couple of songs about being lonely so far away from home, though he hadn't actually left. He also had an Elvis Presley poster on his wall, and a couple of lacy-glove era Madonna calendars, 'but I used to keep them under the bed. They'd only come out on special occasions. I used to masturbate like a lunatic, but only over Madonna, for some reason. Can you imagine if I met her now? So many secrets. . .' Brought up in rural, conservative Crieff, near Perth, in a bungalow, then in a flat in a boarding school where his father was teaching. Ewan was the younger son of Jim, a PE teacher, and Carol, a special needs teacher: both recently retired, 'both brilliant'. His elder brother Colin head boy, sporty, academic, more conventionally promising than Ewan is now a pilot in the RAF: 'I used to knock around with him a bit when I was young, but it was always, like 'your time will come'. I hated those words.' These days, Ewan and his brother get on: Ewan thinks Colin is like his dad, but he is like his mum. His dad found it hard to cope with the unstructured time when he retired; his mum flourished, doing a sculpting course, and 'audio-describing', where she sits at the back of a theatre and describes the set and action for visually impaired people, who can hear her over headphones. 'It's an amazing skill, to fit it in between the dialogue,' says Ewan, proudly. 'If he pulls a gun out of his pocket, you've got to say: 'He pulls the gun out of his pocket' in between the 'You bastard, I'm going to kill you' and the 'No don't kill me'. She's trying to do videos now, she wants to do Trainspotting. You can imagine it, can't you? 'He rams a needle into his arm and collapses backwards on to the floor. Oh, son!' Her brother was even more theatre-friendly; he is the actor Denis Lawson, who starred in Local Hero. It was Uncle Denis's occasional appearance at the McGregor family home, sporting full 1970s furry coat regalia and no shoes, that inspired young Ewan to have a shot at acting. By his mid-teens, he had become obsessed, disdaining school plays because he hadn't yet had the training, badgering Perth Repertory Theatre to 'let me in to do something'. His lack of success led to him becoming withdrawn, and it was his parents who suggested he leave school at 16, without qualifications, to get on with his chosen career. Eleven years later, Uncle Denis is about to direct his superstar nephew in a David Halliwell play, Little Malcolm and the Struggle Against the Eunuchs, at the Hampstead Theatre Club. And what of Ewan's own little family? He met his wife Eve, who's French and a production designer, on the set of Kavanagh QC, in January 1994, when he was 22. They were married just over a year later; Clara, their little girl, is now two-and-a-half. Usually, Eve and Clara accompany Ewan wherever he's filming, but not always, and in February 1997, when Ewan was in Los Angeles working on the Tarantino-directed episode of ER, Clara got meningitis. Ewan and Eve were both very frightened: it affected their marriage. Ewan has spent this summer making things right with Eve. 'We have had a lot of talking to do,' he told Jan Moir in Harper's & Queen. So, he and Eve and Clara went on a 'fantastic' holiday for a month this August, to Scotland and France; then Ewan took September off, too, to spend at home though he found being in London meant that he was working most of the time: reshoots, publicity, little obligations. 'Next time I'll just stay away on holiday.' As he talks, I can hear Clara talking to Eve. Ewan tells me he's pleased to be back in London, working but living at home. He's glad not to be on a movie set. 'I'm not bored of acting but I got tired of films. I stopped for a bit because I wasn't bounding on to the set in the mornings any more.' Now he's doing Little Malcolm with his uncle, and it's just been announced that he is to make his own directing debut, doing a six-minute section of Tube Tales: a film for Sky TV made up of 10 stories, all set on the London Underground. Other directors include Jarvis Cocker, the writer Armando Ianucci, and the actor Jude Law. Ewan's piece is about searching for a lost love. It wasn't his idea: he was asked to do it. Ewan is a chap who finds it hard to say no: 'Someone says, 'What about this?' and I just go, 'Oh, OK'.' Airily dismissive of Hollywood blockbusters (except Star Wars), he finds it impossible to turn down friends, which is why he returns to the same directors and writers (the Trainspotting team, Mark Herman who wrote Brassed Off and Little Voice). And it means that, in between films, he ends up doing voice-overs for advertisements, and airline safety videos, taking daft parts in short films, forming a production company (Natural Nylon) with his mates Jude Law, Sean Pertwee, Johnny Lee Miller and Sadie Frost so they can act together. It's this same appeasing trait that leads him into bumper packs-worth of press. 'Actually, interviews can make me feel insecure,' he admits. 'People feel they have the right to ask you absolutely anything. They say, 'How do you show your romantic side to your wife?', and I say, 'Absolutely none of your fucking business', and they get annoyed. It freaks you out. You start thinking, 'Is my family life really secure, like I think it is? How am I dealing with all this attention?' You long for it to be over and then you come back and start work and it all starts again.' In Scarborough, he'd confessed that he can't stand it if he thinks someone doesn't like him. Worrying about what people think of you is a strange quirk in one so confident, but Ewan has always been like this, right through school, all the way up. He's mentioned it a lot in interviews. He told me about the last time he'd lost his temper, during A Life Less Ordinary when he was strapped to a wheel and spun round all day. He described an unbelievable litany of petty frustrations, other people's incompetence and his own hard work, ending with him snapping a teensy bit at a driver who wouldn't let him eat a sandwich in the back of the car. After listening to his story, you thought that anyone else, anyone less easy-going, would have ripped the driver's head off and shoved it between two slices for their tea. Still, Ewan felt bad about it the next day. 'I thoroughly thought about it, because I am so insecure.' I ask him about this when we're talking on the telephone. He isn't insecure, not really, so why did he bother? Why worry? 'I'm a chameleon, baby,' chortles Ewan. But he's not. That's what's nice about him: he's always the same; he's got sense and optimism written all the way through him, like a stick of rock. So what's with this 'everyone must love me' rubbish? Perhaps Ewan wants people to like him because he wants everyone to get on, he wants life to be joyful and sunny and problem-free. He's still a happy kid. 'That's it. You're right. I just get fed up if everything's not great. I always like it when I feel really happy and I want everything to be good all the time,' he says. But it can't be. 'Well, when it's not, I get pissed off. I'm like, 'Why can't it just be good, instead of this?' Come on, I love you, you love me, get on with it, it's great.' In the background, I can hear Eve getting on with it. Clara chatters more loudly. 'I've got to go now,' murmurs Ewan, happily. 'I've got to put my daughter to bed.' |