Ewan’s the real deal

Authenticity is key for A Gentleman In Moscow star Ewan McGregor, writes Siobhan Duck A Gentleman In Moscow

FROM dramas to comedies, real-life romantic partners bring a palpable chemistry to the screen. Among the Hollywood couples who have been lucky enough to achieve cinematic immortality through multiple films together are Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell; and Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz.

It’s a similar story for Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. The pair met in early 2017 while filming the third season of acclaimed TV drama

Fargo, playing star-crossed schemers trying to pull off a heist. Now, the couple – who reunited onscreen in the 2020 film

Birds Of Prey before welcoming their son Laurie in 2021 – are starring together in the new drama series A Gentleman In

Moscow, and once again they fall in love on camera.

“I can’t tell you, first of all, how perfect it feels to come to work to play this beautiful romance with my wife,” McGregor says of working with Winstead, who he married in 2022. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Based on the 2016 novel by American author Amor Towles, follows the charismatic Count Alexander Rostov (McGregor) in the period after the Russian Revolution, as he navigates life in communist Russia while living under house arrest in an attic room of the grand Metropol hotel. But even in his confinement, he opens his heart to one of the hotel’s guests, Anna Urbanova (Winstead), a seductive, self-made film star.

The two characters could not be more different.

“Right from the start of the story, she comes careering into his life in the piazza and sweeps him off his feet,” McGregor says.

McGregor is a proven screen chameleon who has breezed between arthouse films and blockbusters in his career, playing everything from a drug addict for his break-out role in 1996’s

Trainspotting to a romantic playwright in 2001’s Moulin

Rouge! and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. To play the count, the Scottish actor insisted on growing his own distinct facial hair so that he could give a more authentic performance.

“It’s miserable wearing a fake moustache because you can’t move your lips properly,” he says.

“It affects the way you talk.

“You don’t feel free to express yourself because you’re worried it’s going to fall off.”

It’s this kind of attention to detail that gives A Gentleman

In Moscow a Golden Age of Hollywood feel.

“It’s not old-fashioned, yet it does have something,” he insists.

“It has its heart in old movies and storytelling. I often feel like it when we’re playing scenes that could be in black and white. This is beautiful. I just think people will be touched by it.” A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW

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