Ewan McGregor: ‘I had a drinking problem’

When Ewan McGregor appointed his chosen rendezvous for our breakfast interview – at the eleventh hour, alarmingly literally, the night before – messages were left with the manager to reserve a quiet table. We may still think of him as a barely grown-up Scottish lad, but he is a Hollywood film star, after all, whose main home these days is in Los Angeles. The reservation request turns out to be a laughable idea, since the Honest Sausage – as he jokes later, “I take you to all the high-class establishments” – is not an ironically named celebrity restaurant but a caff in Regent’s Park.

McGregor is 40 now, still boyish and lean, with pleasant but unremarkable features, apart from his eyes which really are dazzling close up. I have struggled but failed to find a phrase to do justice to them since everything ends up sounding a bit Barbara Cartland (“He fixed her with his azure eyes, which shone as though washed by starlight”), so let’s just say they are very clear and bright and make the experience of gazing on his face quite agreeable.

McGregor is not one of those actors, like, say, the late Dennis Hopper or, in a completely different way, Jeremy Irons, who always seem to be playing a version of themselves. I first remember him, at the start of his career, playing a fresh-faced civil servant in Dennis Potter’s Lipstick on Your Collar. He was offered the part six months before he completed his drama course at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Then, two years later, Shallow Grave, in which he plays a disreputable journalist, followed by his breakthrough role as the junkie, Renton, in Trainspotting (also directed by Danny Boyle). The chain-smoking brass band northerner in Brassed Off, the posh Frank Churchill in Emma, the all-singing, all-dancing romantic lead in Moulin Rouge! opposite Nicole Kidman, the out-of-his-depth hack in The Ghost, not to mention Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels… McGregor clearly does not have to worry about being typecast.

This chameleon ability to disappear into his roles may also explain why no one, in our time together, seems to think that the laid-back guy in black jeans and a black T-shirt with a large tattoo on his arm and a small, strawberry-blond poodle on his lap is, actually, you know, a really famous actor. At one point, a middle-aged American woman casually approaches us (no double take of recognition) – we are sitting outside at a round table, on a circular bench – and asks for some advice with directions. McGregor is unbelievably helpful, walks over to a map, and spends a good five minutes pointing out his recommended route.

McGregor is not at all boring, although I feared, off the screen, he might be. In his youth, he was a bit of a Britpop bad boy, hanging out with the likes of the Gallaghers, and our equivalent of the brat pack – Jude and Sadie, Jonny Lee Miller, Sean Pertwee (who together formed an anti-Hollywood film production company, Natural Nylon, though McGregor left it in 2002). In early interviews, he got sloshed with journalists and made all manner of injudicious comments. In later interviews, by which time he’d forsworn drink, he has attempted to avoid anything controversial, sometimes becoming prickly when reminded of his previous statements. In our time together, he talks in a visceral way about “the misery” of being a drunk and of the “unbearable” lifestyle that came with it.

There was also the business of those adventure travels around the world on motorbikes with his mate, Charley Boorman, which were filmed for two TV series, with accompanying DVDs and books. Grown men discovering motorbikes is the classic symptom of the male midlife crisis but, as McGregor says, he has been riding motorbikes since he was 19, and anyway he thinks that, “It’s terribly demeaning: ‘Midlife crisis.’ It suggests that what you’re doing is driven by some kind of crazed fear of your own mortality, whereas I think these big changes and decisions in life or deciding to travel are really interesting. Midlife blossoming might be a better term.”

As it turns out, McGregor is not a macho bloke at all, but a lady who lunches in disguise. “There’s nothing I like more when I’m not working than when Eve [Mavrakis, his French wife, pronounced Ev, like Kev] is having lunch with her girlfriends and I go along,” he says. “When you see women in a restaurant having lunch, they’re so into each other, you know? There’s a real connection like nothing else is going on, and it’s wonderful. Whereas men are too busy showing each other how big their d***s are.

“I’m not massively gregarious but my friends are mainly our friends… Mainly couples. I’m always much happier with women in social situations. Hanging out with men seems to encourage that kind of macho thing of putting each other down. I don’t like it and I’m not very good at it.”

One of his new films (he always seems to have at least three on the go) is Beginners, in which he plays Oliver, the son of Christopher Plummer’s Hal, who comes out as gay, aged 75, after the death of his wife. McGregor played the part of a gay man, opposite Jim Carrey, in the comedy I Love You Phillip Morris and now, it seems, the American press “are all obsessed with the fact that I’ve made films about gay issues and they’re trying to see if maybe that means that I’m gay!

“But I read the parts that are written for macho men and I just find them really embarrassing, because I don’t know any men like that. None of my friends kind of go [he swaggers and grunts], ‘F***, yeah’ with one-liners in that kind of macho, movie way. I think maybe it’s a kind of fantasy that American men try to live up to. It’s very boring and it’s also usually unattractive to women. I’m much more interested in talking to people and finding out what’s going on. I’m not really competitive with men and I don’t like it if they’re competitive with me; it makes me bristle.

“Now that I’m 40 years old and obviously incredibly wise [McGregor goes in for this gently ironic playfulness a lot], I find that it happens with me. There’s a kind of jealousy sometimes, so I’ll go somewhere else, and it’s infuriating for the person who was trying to get at you. So they end up, like at parties, following you around until you either have to say something or leave.”

McGregor and his family’s home for the past three years or so has been in Brentwood, near Santa Monica. (“I say I live there, but it’s where I return between jobs, you know! I just work too much really.”) He still has a house in St John’s Wood but is staying near Regent’s Park at the moment, because the London home is being rented out. “We’ve lived in America for a wee while [he still sounds incredibly Scottish] but we’ll be back, I’m sure. I think it’s just a temporary thing.”

McGregor was born in Perth and brought up in a small town nearby. Both his parents are teachers and his uncle is the actor Denis Lawson, who was married to the late actress Sheila Gish. His older brother Colin is a former RAF pilot, with whom he made a documentary on the Battle of Britain.

He met Eve, who is five years older than him, on the set of an episode of Kavanagh QC in 1995, where she was working as the production designer. They got married in a French village and their first daughter, Clara, was born the following year: “I was 24, quite young.” Clara is 15 now and has two nine-year-old sisters, Esther and Jamiyan; the latter was adopted by the couple in Mongolia in 2006. I wonder how this came about, presuming it all began when McGregor was there on his bike adventure, but he says, politely, “It’s the one thing I don’t ever talk about, to be honest, because I don’t like the way people talk about adoptions and celebrities. I don’t want to be involved in it. It’s very private.”

His flamboyant heart and dagger tattoo boasts the names of his wife and girls in a fancy, loopy script. I ask him if there are any more children and he pats his dog and says, “I have to put Sid’s name on there at some point.” Only after our interview, puzzlingly, do I find out that there is a fourth daughter, reportedly again adopted and apparently born in March this year.

What interests him coming back to the UK is the perceived stereotype of Los Angeles as a place of plastic surgery and fakeness: “But I find life in LA to be quite a suburban experience; all the little areas are really kind of community-minded and neighbourliness is quite strong there, which I really like. After school, you can hear the kids playing next door and it’s kind of old-fashioned and a bit like the childhood I had, except it’s LA not Scotland so it doesn’t rain so much.”

He is very taken, indeed, with his daughters’ school, which is liberal and a bit hippyish: “They really encourage the children to be supportive and nice to each other in a way that is so different to British schools where, you know, if you’re good at something, you get f***ing s*** on from everybody, and if you’re not very good at something, you get s*** on by everybody. So I think kids are always ducking and diving and wondering where the next attack on their little character is.

“They’ve got things on the door like you have to ask these three questions before you say something to someone: ‘Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?’ These are the three things you must think before you say something like, ‘You’re c*** at geography.’ And when my daughters get up they all really want to go to school.”

The only thing he seems to miss about London, bizarrely, is the Tube. “They’re talking about getting a train line from downtown LA to Santa Monica and it would just transform the whole city because, ultimately, it’s boring not being able to get around. When we’re at home in St John’s Wood, if we’re going to Tate Modern, we get a Tube straight down to Southwark. And when I was rehearsing for Othello [he was Iago], I took the Tube down there every day and I really liked it.”

McGregor has worked with an illustrious roll call of writers and directors, starting with Dennis Potter, then Danny Boyle (with whom he later, famously, fell out; more anon), Peter Greenaway, Woody Allen, Ridley Scott, Baz Luhrmann and Todd Haynes. He has huge respect for Mike Mills, the director of Beginners, whose background is directing music videos (Moby, Yoko Ono, Air) and graphic design (for Marc Jacobs, the fashion designer, as well as creating album covers for the Beastie Boys, Beck and Sonic Youth). His debut feature film was Thumbsucker in 2005, starring Tilda Swinton and Keanu Reeves, about a young boy, his mother, a doctor and, as McGregor says, “relationships”.

Beginners is also about relationships, as well as an examination of truth and lies. Christopher Plummer is a septuagenarian father who comes out after the death of his wife and explores his new, non-theoretical gay self with all the enthusiasm of an absolute beginner, clubbing, embracing gay politics and finding a boyfriend. McGregor, as his son, bereaved after the death of both his parents (the time sequences flash backward and forward), begins a love affair with a French actress, Anna (played by a real French actress, Mélanie Laurent).

I say that it feels very much like an art-house film but McGregor prefers just to call it art. It is certainly unusual: Hal’s dog, Arthur, a Jack Russell terrier, speaks to Oliver in subtitles; the screen at one point becomes a series of bright, eye-scorching colours, which feels like an art installation; scribbly drawings feature quite heavily, as well as graphic illustrations relating to the film’s themes. The scenes between the son and the father are moving and Plummer, remarkably 81 now, is particularly impressive. It’s a bit Woody Allen meets Godard but, still, it is highly original, perhaps, in part, because it is based on the real story of Mills’s father, who came out, only to die of cancer five years later.

McGregor remembers that when they came to shoot the scene in which Hal dies, everyone was upset, particularly Mills. “He says not – but I’m sure it must have been like reliving the memory of that for him,” says McGregor. “You see me crying on top of Hal’s body and then it cuts to a montage of all the things you need to do when someone dies – the brutality of it being such an extraordinarily emotional experience, and then you have to deal with the paperwork and bureaucracy and get someone to come to pick up the body and it’s just awful.”

Most excruciating, the actor says, were the role-play exercises Mills insisted on between McGregor and Laurent. The first time they met, at Mills’s home, the director sat them down and said that he wanted them to imagine they’d been a couple for three years, and then he wanted them to break up with each other. But since you are both actors, I ask, what’s the problem?

“First of all, it’s improvisation, so you have no lines and it’s enormously exposing. You’ve got no character or anything, so it really is just you and you can’t help but think, ‘She’s thinking this is how I would really break up with someone.’ It was so embarrassing, but by the end of it we were somehow locked together in something, so it was really, really clever.”

Laurent, he says, is “like a force of nature. She comes into the room and it’s like, ‘Woah!’ She’s very funny and you just don’t know what’s going to happen next. She’s kind of gloriously French and like an actress almost from another era − a wonderful whirlwind of a girl.”

But it was Cosmo, the Jack Russell terrier who plays Arthur, that he was really smitten by; if I were Sid, I’d be a bit concerned, frankly, as McGregor still seems to burn a candle for his predecessor. “We really got to know Cosmo and play with him. I really think you can feel, you know, his little character.

“I grew up with dogs but I hadn’t owned one myself in my adult life until Sid. I found him [in a shelter] on the last day of the shoot on Beginners because I was preparing to be without Cosmo, who I’d really fallen in love with, and it was really difficult…”

On the internet, there are photos of him cycling around his LA neighbourhood with Sid in a basket on the handlebars (as well as papped shots of him walking arm-in-arm with Laurent in Paris, with the inevitable if unfair conjectures) and he’s apparently going to invest in a motorbike sidecar for his four-legged friend.

But apart from the cycling, he’s not doing any exercise at the moment. He’s recently come off a four-month shoot in Thailand with Naomi Watts for The Impossible, about a family who were caught in the tsunami of 2004: “I spent 80 per cent of the film with my shirt off, which was probably more harrowing for the actor than anyone else, so I was being careful about eating and exercising, and as a reaction against that, as soon as I was finished, I thought, ‘F*** it.’ ”

Are you vain? “Well… I’m quite happy with myself, but if I am vain, it’s that I like to play with my hair. I’ve always been like that ever since I was a schoolkid, when I hated going to school if my hair was clean and fluffy.” After making Velvet Goldmine, in which he plays a rock star, McGregor took to wearing make-up: “Yeah, I used to wear quite a lot of eyeliner and stuff.” Would you have turned up to an interview with eyeliner on? “Back in the day, yeah.”

Back in the day, McGregor confessed to an interviewer that he had a poster of Madonna on his bedroom wall which he used to gaze on when he was masturbating. I remind him of this when he says that he never really liked her. “F***! When did I say that? Arrghh, old drinking days. Yeah, I did have a calendar of her when I was 13. Oh God, that whole slutty, lacy look… Fantastic.

“I met Madonna recently for a film and she was quite nice to me. Maybe she did her research and read the clippings.”

He also said that his influences were “sex, my uncle and black-and-white movies” – what did he mean by the first thing on the list? “I was obviously being interviewed by some fantastic looking young girl, but it must have been a long time ago.

“It’s terrible being interviewed because, you know, how much do we change from when we were 21? I came out of the gates really fast and I was successful and felt invincible – drinking and just, like, living the life… Trainspotting and then the mid-Nineties and Oasis and Blur and it was, ‘Fuckin’ wayhey!’ And someone asks, ‘What are your inspirations?’ And you go, f*** it, ‘Sex!’ And then you cut to being 40 years old, at the Honest Sausage, with you asking [prim voice], ‘When you said, one of your influences was sex, what did you mean?’ ”

We both have a good laugh at this.

So do you feel that you’ve changed a lot, in fundamental ways? After a longish pause, he says: “I think not drinking makes a huge change in your life, because I used to drink too much, and I haven’t had a drink now for more than ten years. I had a drinking problem, which is why I stopped, and now I don’t do anything [drugs or alcohol] because that’s what being sober is about. It alters everything about you, because you become much more part of the world. Drinking is a very self-centred way of being; you’re really, really inside yourself somehow and you’re not able to look out or empathise properly with people.”

Did you have blackouts? “Yeah, and I found it just unbearable. I found it was an unbearable way of life and it made me miserably unhappy.” How are you now around people who are drinking? “It’s boring – like if you’re sitting with someone who’s stoned and you’re not stoned.” Presumably you were doing coke, as well as drinking? “My mother’s going to read this interview!” Well, it’s way in your past now. “You see people coming at you in clubs or at parties and because it’s not part of my consciousness now, it takes me a little while to remember when people are kind of gnashing in your face, and then you go, ‘Oh, yeah, f***,’ because you’re in the cold light of day and sober and you think, all that is such a waste of time. It really is such a massive waste of time.”

The falling out between him and Danny Boyle goes back over a decade. Boyle offered McGregor the central role in The Beach, released in 2000, adapted from the hugely successful novel by Alex Garland – and then passed him over for Leonardo DiCaprio. I ask McGregor whether he and Boyle are friends again now. “No,” he says bluntly. Was it the way Boyle handled it or the fact that it happened at all? “You just don’t treat your friends like that. They absolutely made me think that I was playing the character in The Beach and we talked about dates and moving dates and so on, and all the while they were keeping me there just in case Leonardo pulled out – which is really nasty. And then afterwards, I just didn’t hear from Danny for years.”

It sounds pretty unforgivable. What was Boyle thinking? “When he told me, he was very conflicted and he was very upset, and I spent a lot of time making him feel better and saying, ‘No, it’s all right. I understand.’ And when I went home, I thought ‘F***! That doesn’t feel very nice.’ And my wife was furious. So I phoned up the producer, Andrew [Macdonald, who also produced Shallow Grave and Trainspotting], who I felt was part of the team. And I said, ‘Andrew, I’ve just had lunch with Danny and I don’t understand. I didn’t think that’s really what we were about. I thought we were about something else. I really thought we stood for something.’ And he went, ‘Oh come on, it was gonna happen sooner or later.’ And then I never heard from them for years. I shouldn’t really talk about this, but they wanted me to do the sequel to Trainspotting, Porno. So I got a semi-apology: ‘Feel like we didn’t handle that very well… Anyway, would you like to do Porno...?’ ” I take it that’s a “No”.

Our time is up, and as we walk through the park, with Sid pulling on his lead with excitement, McGregor says he feels a bit bad venting about Boyle. Earlier in the year, he was offered the chance to say a few words about his fellow Scot at an awards ceremony where Boyle was being honoured, and he accepted. He’s beginning to think that life is too short to bear grudges and it’s time, as the Californians say, to move on. The actor said some gracious things about how the director was responsible for launching his career, and Boyle was gracious back, saying he didn’t really deserve the praise. So who knows? Perhaps that Renton role may be reprised, after all.

We talk about Cheryl Cole – “She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” – and how America has rejected her, and he says stoutly: “Well, she’s better off back here then, our Cheryl, where she’s liked and loved by the British people.”

What a turn-up for the books – an actor who is curious about other people (most unusually, I had to stop him asking questions about my life), funny, kind-hearted and unpretentious. And do you know what? The venue he chose was perfect.

The Times