Why Ewan McGregor still rocks at 45

“People have asked me if he becomes a hero, and I really don’t think so. I don’t see him as being a hero in any way,” he confesses.

McGregor has played properly heroic types, notably the young Alec Guinness – the Jedi philosopher knight Obi-Wan Kenobi – in the unfortunate Nineties trilogy of Star Wars prequels. In recent years, such roles have dwindled as his work has become more eclectic than box office. His stardom endures, however, the attachment of his name important to the financing of Our Kind of Traitor and crucial to Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis biopic, Miles Ahead.

As I wait outside his hotel suite for my time with McGregor, a publicist frets at the conundrum of how to find him a suitable Italian lunch venue within walking distance of Charing Cross. “If we change ‘high-end’ for ‘quality’, what does that get us?” she asks down the phone. Yet a few floors below lies the five-star Massimo restaurant. It is slightly wondrous that the first thing Susanna White, the director of Traitor, thinks to tell me about McGregor is how un-grand, he is, how little the diva.

McGregor, at 45, dressed this morning in a dark Paul Harnden jacket and black scarf, is a disconcertingly beautiful man. His hair looks suspiciously fair to me, but his face is fresh, clear and barely lined, testimony to a run of 15 alcohol-free years and, perhaps, high-end Italian restaurants. Short on screen next to his fellow Jedi Liam Neeson, he is, I’d estimate, a perfectly serviceable 5ft 10in.

He has never been self-conscious about his body, early in his career claiming that his frequent nude scenes were gestures of solidarity with actresses who had long been expected to do the same. When his father, James, then a PE teacher in Crieff, near Perth in Scotland, saw every part of him in Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film The Pillow Book, he remarked he was glad to see his son had inherited one of his “major attributes”. Or so McGregor claimed.

His braggadocio extended to a flirtatious appearance many years ago on a US cable channel when he responded literally to the female interviewer’s inquiry as to whether his nude scenes were “hard”. Once, he said, with the older actress Alice Krige, in the 1993 miniseries Scarlet and Black. He apologised.

Much more recently he told Graham Norton that before he married – he was just 24 and had met the French production designer Eve Mavrakis on ITV’s Kavanagh QC less than a year earlier later – he had had “many, many woman”.

“I was very arrogant when I was young,” he tells me, referring to his acting. “Nowadays, I get nervous about every role I play. Especially in the theatre. It’s not something that gets easier as you get older. It’s the opposite in a way.”

Youthful arrogance is always forgivable but the more so in his case because success arrived so precipitately. Although his parents were both teachers, his mother, Carol, is the sister of the actor Denis Lawson, whose appearances in Star Wars predated his nephew’s by roughly two decades. Lawson was an exotic figure, and the small-town boy wanted to be him.

With Dev Patel and Danny Boyle at the Bafta LA awards in 2009

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By 1993, before he had even graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he had taken the lead in Dennis Potter’s Channel 4 series Lipstick on Your Collar. The next year he was Alex Law, the faithless, cocky young hack in Shallow Grave, directed by Danny Boyle and produced by Andrew Macdonald. Trainspotting followed two years later. He could not have been more a part of the zeitgeist or of the great big party that the zeitgeist threw for itself.

How close did he come to ruining himself in that period? “I managed to stop myself before I did damage to my career or my marriage, but I was a young man in the middle of something big. The party scene was huge. I was 23 or something when I made Trainspotting, so it was young to have that sort of success. Also, I was just a young guy. I didn’t do anything more than most other people my age were doing, but I was in the public eye.”

The morning after was swift and sudden. In 1997 he made the much less successful A Life Less Ordinary with Boyle and Macdonald, but was led to believe he would star in their adaptation of the briefly cultish Alex Garland novel The Beach. Instead, they chose Leonardo DiCaprio, newly disembarked from Titanic – a decision, he says, everyone seemed aware of except him. It took more than a decade for McGregor and Boyle’s relationship to recover, although recover it has. When we meet, he is about to film a Trainspotting sequel to be titled, he tells me, T2.

“It was almost nothing to do with The Beach. I mean, of course it was all over The Beach and my understanding that I was playing the role. To discover that I wasn’t came as a bit of a shock. It wasn’t just not getting that role. It was [the way] it was handled that wasn’t very clever. It did knock me a little bit.

“I was disappointed because I put so much importance in being their actor. It defined me as an actor. It felt like it was a badge on my sleeve: I am Danny Boyle’s actor. It felt like it was the most important thing of my career. Leading up to it, I was in the running for Star Wars, but I had meetings with them, saying, ‘If the dates clash, I’ll do The Beach. I’ll turn Star Wars down.’ Eighteen years since that point, I just regret all the films that we didn’t make together, me and Danny.”

They had bumped into each other over the years. Each time it was bittersweet. “It was like meeting an old lover or something. Ultimately, it was nice to see him, always.”

In 2009, Boyle asked him to speak at a Bafta ceremony in America in which he was being recognised, and McGregor agreed on the understanding it was not going to be televised. He turned up and, of course, “there were f***ing TV cameras everywhere” and he was following Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert De Niro on to the stage. Dev Patel, from Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, did the first tribute and then McGregor went on and spoke from the heart, without notes, directly to Boyle.

“When Danny got up at the end, he thanked us and he talked about how directing is about actors and he was lucky to have two such good actors here tonight and he said something about Dev and then said, ‘And Ewan, whose graciousness I don’t deserve … ’ I felt it was such a beautiful putting to bed of all of that.”

T2 has a “phenomenally good” script by John Hodge, who adapted Irvine Welsh’s original Trainspotting, and is “very loosely” based on Welsh’s 2002 follow-up, Porno, in which the gang reunite in the pornography trade. The characters will be 20 years older and he really can’t tell me anything else.

Are they all still alive? “Well, we’ll see.”

The Beach turned out to be a rare flop for Boyle, and while McGregor’s Star Wars films were unloved, films that take $2.5 billion at the box office are no disaster movies. Yet, although made in Britain, the films had not earned McGregor the muscle within the industry he thought his due. Struggling to extract government money in the early years of the new century for a small movie called Young Adam, “something cracked”.

With his wife, Eve Mavrakis, at the Serpentine Gallery summer party in 2015

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“I thought, ‘I’ve put all my eggs in this basket and the basket doesn’t care.’ I thought, ‘Oh, f**k it.’ So I just moved to the States.”

The family bought a house in Los Angeles in 2005, enjoying the city’s suburban normality rather than its big-shot parties. By now he was in his mid-thirties, married and a father, and his drinking days were over, ended by him aged 29. I ask why he had drunk so much.

“I just drank because that’s what I’d done. That was my experience, I suppose. When I was a kid in Scotland, that’s what we did on the weekends. We would meet somewhere and drink, like a lot of kids do, to excess. I sort of got used to it and there was that hedonism of the mid-to-late Nineties, with Brit Cool and Brit Pop and Oasis and Blur. The movie version of that scene was Trainspotting and being the figure of that was pretty fantastic. We had fun. It was our Sixties, I suppose, the Nineties.

“It just kept going. It just wasn’t so much fun any more. So I decided to stop. It wasn’t that big a deal. I mean, it’s not an easy thing to do, especially here – the culture is so wrapped up in alcohol and drinking – but it was just one too many things in my life. I was an actor; I was a husband, a father, and I was a drinker. And the one I was willing to let go was the drinking. So I just did that and it made everything else much easier. My life is much better for it. I don’t miss it.”

Did he go into AA? “I did for a time. I mean, I didn’t go straight into AA. And I had a therapist, a sort of alcoholic specialist whom I spoke to for a while and that helped me give up. And now I don’t do anything. I don’t drink at all. That’s it. It’s a nicer life.”

There is, I say, a telling line in Our Kind of Traitor. Stellan Skarsgård, playing Dima, the Russian gangster, points to Perry’s wife, Gail (Naomie Harris), and says, “You have a good woman there.”

“Yes,” says McGregor, continuing Dima’s line for me: “It’s the only thing that matters.”

Everything else is bulls***, that quote ends. If he widens that to include his four daughters, is that his take on life?

“Yes. I love my work, too, but I don’t love it more than my family. Luckily, the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. But I do think that’s what’s most important, yes. Going home … ”

Despite his early history with women, there has never been any serious suggestion that McGregor has been disloyal to his wife, who, it has to be said, is just as beautiful as him. The notion of family is clearly something he values. The week we meet, he has taken his mother for lunch with Susanna White, his director. He has four daughters, the last two adopted from abroad (abhorring the noise around celebrity adoptions, he habitually refuses to discuss this), and he learnt early the meaning of how children redefine worry.

In 1996, while filming an episode of ER, he was called by his wife to say that their baby, Clara, had meningitis. He waited 16 hours for a flight home and at customs, where he had got used to being searched (thanks to his Trainspotting persona), he adopted the look of a man who would not be stopped.

“It was horrendous. It was horrendous. The doctors who treated her saved her life and I will always be enormously grateful to them. In the middle of a disaster, they nailed it. They got the right medication into her.”

Was this a moment when he realised he had grown up? “Yes. You’re never quite the same afterwards when you realise they’re vulnerable and that, as a parent, the fibre of your being is about looking after your kids.”

Clara is now 20. On Broadway two years ago, in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, McGregor played Henry, the father of Debbie, a grown-up daughter played by Madeline Weinstein. As Debbie disappears with her first boyfriend, Henry explains what romantic love is: “Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich.”

“I said to Stoppard, ‘I want to thank you for writing the speech I wish I’d given to my daughter when she went off with her boyfriend for the first time.’ Mine wasn’t quite as eloquent.”

McGregor’s first scene in Our Kind of Traitor presents a very different model of manhood, in which we observe neither McGregor the ladykiller (Christian, say, in Moulin Rouge), nor McGregor the uxorious family man. Perry and Gail are making love in a Marrakesh hotel room, and he fails to turn her on. They give up and go down to dinner.

“I love that it’s not the traditional way of introducing a marriage. More normally a marriage would be rosy at the beginning of a movie and something would happen which makes it less rosy and they find a way to deal with it, but this one starts with problems.”

A single line later indicates an immediate reason why the marriage may be in trouble, but that too may be only a symptom of the malaise afflicting Perry. In the book, Perry has missed tenure at Oxford University. In the film we see him delivering a rather dull lecture on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in which he seems to empathise with the poem’s lost souls. His wife is a high-flying lawyer. To put it crudely, although long-haired Perry may be the most glamorous English don ever, something has chewed his balls off.

“You can sort of get into the dangerous waters, I suppose, talking about masculinity or gender stereotypes,” he says, but ploughs on in any case. “He’s really had a fall in his professional life and then struggles with the idea that his wife is the breadwinner. Maybe that is the emasculation in his soul.”

Does McGregor’s wife still work?

“She doesn’t at the moment. She designs commercials now and again in Los Angeles. She hasn’t a designed a movie for a while, but she will.”

Would he mind if she earned more than him? “I don’t think it would bother me very much. I don’t know. I’m not in that scenario.”

He certainly had no difficulty being directed by a woman in Our Kind of Traitor. White is one of the just 9 per cent of directors making a film last year who were female. “It’s purely, I think, that the business is run by men. It’s a lack of imagination on the people who are paying for movies, the producers, this idea that you’ve got to be shouting to keep the troops moving.”

I think we can say that if McGregor is insecure about anything, it is not his relationship with women. Nor is it his sexuality; he was, after all, happy to kiss Jim Carrey in I Love You Phillip Morris and play a flamboyant gay rock star in Velvet Goldmine. Indeed, it may be a sign of his self-confidence that most of his recent movie roles have not been alpha males.

In Miles Ahead, the Miles Davis film, he plays the fictional, corduroy-jacketed music journalist Dave Braden, who is trying to interview Davis and ends up helping him retrieve a stolen session tape. “He’s just along for the ride for most of the film,” says McGregor, who did no publicity for it, probably for fear of stealing Cheadle’s thunder.

McGregor is the star in Rodrigo Garcia’s movie Last Days in the Desert, which is due to open in the UK next month. He plays Christ – and Satan – in his 40-day wilderness period. Yet this is not the miracle-working Jesus we meet, but a man exhausted by his fasting and unable to hear God’s voice. The film is about a breakdown in a father-son relationship. He told Christianity Today he thought about how sons normally go through such periods of poor communication. “I just tried to think about that, except I imagined God was my dad.”

These roles have followed Roman Polanski’s 2010 thriller The Ghost – an adaptation of the 2007 Robert Harris novel – in which he played a ghostwriter to a discredited former prime minister (so ghostly and anonymous is his character that he is not even given a name). He was the son caring for his domineering father in the sweet, arty, romantic comedy Beginners, and the awkward fishing scientist in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. True, he has also played Australia’s most notorious armed robber (Son of a Gun) and a father searching for his family after a tsunami (The Impossible), but the trend has been away from protagonists.

I say I enjoy seeing him play these introverts – although were I on oath I would admit I actually prefer him full throttle as Mark Renton. He says he approaches every part in exactly the same way.

“I just don’t really like movie types, character stereotypes. In most thrillers or action movies, there’s a sort of Hollywood silent, chiselled, steely character, but I’ve never met anybody like that.”

They would be a***holes if he did. “A***holes, yes! So I’ve always tried to play real people and I think real people aren’t always fully confident.”

If you ask, as I do, where McGregor’s insecurities lie, the answer comes promptly. They are all about directing. Some 15 years ago he fell in love with a novella called Silk by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco, about a smuggler of silkworm eggs. The film rights were originally owned by Miramax and then by the director Mike Figgis. They had dinner one night in which he confessed his desire to direct it. Figgis asked a series of questions – whether he had broken down the script was one – and McGregor was daunted because he had no answers. When the rights reverted back to Baricco, McGregor secured the theoretical agreement of Jeremy Thomas (Young Adam, The Last Emperor) to produce it.

“And then Baricco was interviewed and in his interview he said, ‘Only a master film-maker will adapt my novel for the screen.’ And I read that and went, ‘Well, I’m f***ed. I’m not a master film-maker.’ I listened to all the negative voices in my head until such time it was made by somebody else.”

François Girard, in fact, and it bombed.

Now, however, he has just directed a film, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, in part about, as it happens, a father (played by McGregor) and a daughter (played by Dakota Fanning) who, aged 16, becomes a terrorist. He had been attached to the project as an actor for three years. Two directors dropped out. McGregor despaired that the movie would never happen.

In Miles Ahead with Don Cheadle

“Suddenly my agent said to me, ‘You’ve been looking for an idea to direct for years. It’s right under your nose.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He said, ‘American Pastoral! You should direct American Pastoral.’”

“I had sleepless nights of doubt. The responsibility of it is massive.”

He was in New York for The Real Thing. It was a Monday. No performance. He poured himself a coffee. “I was sitting there with it all day, thinking, ‘Can I do it?’ And by the end of the day I was so excited about the possibilities. I thought, ‘Don’t let your fear stop you doing this. Just do it. You make a movie. If no one goes to see it, no one’s going to see it.’ But I feel very strongly we’ve made a good movie.”

He recites the names of his “brilliant” cast: Fanning; Jennifer Connelly; David Strathairn; Peter Riegert; Rupert Evans; a newcomer, Valorie Curry.

“And I’m amazing in it.”

Says the director.

“Very difficult to work with, but otherwise rather good.”

By all accounts and taking into account all the evidence, that is only half true. Ewan McGregor is everyone’s kind of star.

Our Kind of Traitor opens on May 13