Ewan McGregor speaks out March 2010
McGregor is in London on a flying visit en route to Berlin, where he’ll be gliding up the red carpet for the world premiere of one of the most contentious movies of the year, The Ghost. The film would always have been controversial, given its plot concerning a former British Prime Minister facing the threat of war-crimes charges over a Middle East invasion: writer Robert Harris was once close to Tony Blair’s inner circle and doesn’t deny the story has characters based on Blair, his wife and Cabinet ministers.
The fictional PM has a former aide who died in sinister circumstances, with the title’s “ghost” referring to both the dead man and to McGregor’s character, who is ghostwriting the PM’s autobiography. His research unearths evidence of illegal rendition, torture and possible murder. It’s disturbing - and thrilling - stuff.
But the real controversy arose in post-production, when the film’s 76-year-old director Roman Polanski was arrested on a warrant dating back to his 1977 trial for unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl. McGregor was in London putting some finishing touches to the sound for The Ghost when he heard the news.
“At first I thought it was a joke,” he says. “Roman was in a studio in Paris and we were talking to each other and he was on good form. The next day I got a text from the producer saying he’d been arrested. I really did think he was kidding. I felt sad for Roman, because he’s an old man who I’m incredibly fond of. I also felt bad for his kids that their dad had been locked up for 23 hours a day. It’s an awful trauma for them.”
The Polish film-maker, who made Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, completed the film under house arrest in Switzerland, where he’s still waiting to find out whether he’ll be extradited to the U.S.
“In terms of the actual case,” McGregor says, “it doesn’t matter what I think, and I don’t believe I’m accountable for it. I don’t think that by working with him as a director I’m condoning what happened 30 years ago.”
The actor predicts, though, that wherever he goes on the long publicity trek for The Ghost, the questions about Polanski will keep coming.
“We’ve started in France, where it’s mild, but I can just see that it’s going to be trickier the further away we go. By the time we get to LA, I’ll need my helmet on...”
By an eerie coincidence, Polanski’s situation is mirrored in the film by that of the Prime Minister, Adam Lang, played by Pierce Brosnan. Lang can’t visit certain countries for fear of being arrested for war crimes. Polanski hasn’t been able to return to the U.S. for 30 years because of the outstanding charges against him, and was eventually arrested en route to a film festival in Zurich from one of his homes in France.
“A lot of scenes rang true with Roman’s situation,” McGregor says. “There’s a scene where Lang is asking ‘Where can I go?’ when he knows he could end up in The Hague to stand trial. He goes through a list of possibilities, because he could be extradited from certain countries. And when we were shooting, we were all aware that this is Roman’s situation. He can go to this country but not that one, or that one. And although we didn’t talk to him about it, and Robert wrote the part before he knew Roman was going to direct, it does ring quite loud that it’s a reference to his own life. And since he’s been arrested it’s amplified. So it’s an odd piece in that way.”
The film can clearly be read as a savage critique of Tony Blair and his relationship with the U.S. in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Robert Harris describes the story as ‘midway between reality and fiction’. Brosnan’s performance isn’t an impersonation of Blair, but McGregor believes the message is clear.
“I think there are too many similarities to Blair to ignore it. When you look at the plot, the ghostwriter thinks Lang may have been involved with the CIA, and was making decisions for America’s benefit. That’s obviously far-fetched. But there are comments on the Iraq war, the torture techniques, and it’s very pertinent.”
McGregor says politicians in general leave him cold. He’s now living in Los Angeles, and even though he says he’ll vote in the forthcoming general election, he’s not sure for which party.
“I just find myself completely uninterested in them. I can’t read about them. I can’t open a newspaper to a page that’s about politics. I don’t care. I’ve never been interested in politics. I’m interested in how the world works to a certain extent, and I’ve certainly got opinions about things that are right and wrong, but I don’t believe in politics and politicians. It just seems to be a game to me.
“My thing about politicians is that ultimately they’re never really accountable for what they do. I think that’s awful. No one goes, ‘Wait a minute, Tony - before you go, don’t you think we have a right to know about this, this and this?’
“People are dead, there’s blood on the streets, and is anyone accountable? I was pleased that Blair had to sit down and answer for his decisions. And saddened Bush never will. Bush has retired to the golf course. I cannot stomach that. It’s not right. Blair hasn’t said sorry or, by all accounts, made any comment to the kids who lost their arms and legs and eyes. Probably thousands of kids - and he hasn’t ever visited them. I don’t know how you live with yourself, really. But then he ended up doing after-dinner speaking, which is hell in itself, so it’s fair play really,” he laughs.
The actor says he will vote “because I think it’s a responsible thing to do. But what happened with Blair? Didn’t we have such high hopes? All those years where I’d only ever known Tory-dom, and then... nothing really changed, did it? Silly things changed, like parking and the congestion charge, but nothing that made a difference. You get elected and you immediately start trading off your ideals for votes.”
McGregor met Blair a few years ago, in his role as a Unicef ambassador at a charity event organised by Robbie Williams.
“I missed out on that period when people like Noel Gallagher and all the coolest people were invited over to show how groovy the Government was, but they had a thing at Number 10 for Soccer Aid, which Robbie organised, and I met him there. I felt he was like any other politician I’d met.”
He slips into a passable Blair voice and holds his hand out. “‘Hello, nice to meet you...’ And someone behind him was whispering, ‘Ewan McGregor.’
“There was a veneer of remembering what his aide had told him three minutes before about who everyone was, just ticking through the pieces of information he’d been fed. I sympathise to an extent, because it must be a nightmare. I felt the same when I met Prince Charles once. It was at the premiere for Moulin Rouge and I was standing next to Nicole (Kidman). He came down the line and got to me - and I’d been making British movies for probably eight years at this point - and he said, ‘And what did you do on the film?’”
McGregor bursts out laughing. “I pointed to Nicole and said, ‘I played her boyfriend.’ I think he just wanted to get on to Nicole, really.”
We’re chatting in the library of the Soho Hotel, where McGregor is staying overnight. He’s dressed in dark blue jeans with black boots and a big, navy blue turtle-neck sweater. His light blond hair is cut in a trendily choppy style, and he’s lean and clearly in good shape. He’s relaxed and a ffable and answers questions easily, even when we touch on potentially tricky subjects.
McGregor was once a party animal who enjoyed all that London’s nightlife had to off er. He clearly felt it was getting out of hand, and hasn’t touched alcohol for years.
“This November it’ll be ten years since I gave up, and I don’t really miss it.”
He pauses, running a hand through his hair.
“Actually, occasionally I do. There are times when I think about it, but I always know that when I’m thinking about it there’s something wrong. The problem isn’t that I want a drink; it’s that for me - as it is for a lot of other people - drink was a way to dull the pain of something else. For people who drink a lot it’s a way of not dealing with emotions and feelings.”
What was he avoiding?
“I think it was growing up. It’s hard to say without making it sound dramatic, which it isn’t. I was just somebody who always liked to drink a lot. So now when I think about drinking I ask myself, OK, what is it? It’s not really that you’re thirsty for a beer, because you haven’t had a beer for ten years. It’s often something else that’s bothering me.”
McGregor, 38, grew up in Crie ff, Perthshire and his parents, Carol and James, are both teachers. For the last 15 years he has been happily married to French production designer Ève Mavrakis, and they have three daughters, Clara, 14, Esther, eight, and Jamiyan, also eight, who was adopted. He has an older brother, Colin, an ex-RAF fighter pilot who served in Iraq. The brothers are close, although they disagreed over the British Government’s decision to go to war in the Gulf.
“He was very gung-ho about wanting to go there, and I found that upsetting. Because I’m trained to be an actor, I was in a di fferent camp on that situation, and I find that quite diffi cult to reconcile. But I learned to appreciate that that was the path he took. I respect that, and I respect all our forces.
“I went out to Basra to meet some of them and I’m full of respect for their work. I don’t think it should be any other way. I worried about Colin more later on, because - and I don’t know if I should say this - I think he felt that they shouldn’t be there. I thought that was scarier than anything, the idea of being out there and flying and putting yourself at risk if you didn’t know why you were there. I thought that was pretty hardcore.”
McGregor swells with pride when he describes how his brother took him for a ride in a Tornado jet.
“We went barrelling down the runway and I was in the seat directly behind him, and because you can’t see what’s coming you can’t prepare for the G-force. You’re wearing a G-suit that inflates and pushes on your body, and it pushes the blood back. Without it you’d just pass out, as the G-force is unbelievable. It’s horrible.
“I was a little sick, but not too much. We did a lot of low-level stu ff and then he went up to 2,000ft, over the clouds, and I started to sweat and I was thinking, ‘Conquer it, conquer it!’ I managed to be all right, but then he asked me to change the frequency on the radio, and as I put my head down he veered o ff. I couldn’t get my head back up, and it’s horrible when you can’t see. I instantly threw up. When you land, you’ve got your little bag of sick on your lap, and the canopy comes up and the ground-crew fella comes up the ladder and he says, ‘OK?’ And you have to hand him the bag.”
McGregor is a proud Scotsman, but clearly not one who believes in Scottish independence. He’s also wary of making comments about his homeland while based thousands of miles away. He feels that Sean Connery, who has campaigned for the SNP but lives mostly as a tax exile in the Bahamas, should keep his nose out, too.
“I once got involved in it by accident by being flippant at a press conference in Cannes when I was drunk and I said something about Connery, which was just a stupid thing, and I won’t drum it up again. But overnight I found myself on the front of the newspapers as the anti-independent Scotland guy, and I’m neither. I’ve not lived in Scotland since I was 17 years old and I wouldn’t dare to say to people in Scotland how they should feel about it, and neither should Connery, in my view. He’s lived abroad for far longer than I have.
“I like the idea of Great Britain. Scottish-English relations aren’t good north of the border. There’s a kind of anti-Englishness - or there was when I left - that I didn’t like, and I can’t imagine that independence would make that any better. There, I’ve got involved in it by saying I’m not involved in it.”
As for the future, there may be another epic motorbike ride with Charley Boorman at some point, but for now he’s focusing on films. Last year he was busier than ever, filming The Ghost straight after The Men Who Stare At Goats with George Clooney. There were reports that when the James Bond producers were looking for a new 007, they approached McGregor to see if he was interested, before eventually choosing Daniel Craig.
“No they didn’t,” he laughs. “I mean, they probably spoke to everybody about it, but they never off ered it to me.”
It’s a shame, I say, because he’d make a great Bond.
“Yeah, well, it’s not too late...”
