CELEBRITIES
Scottish actor Ewan McGregor has such a vivid imagination he can do scenes with co-stars who aren’t even there.
Scottish actor Ewan McGregor has such a vivid imagination he can do scenes with co-stars who aren’t even there. That’s a useful talent to have, especially when said co-stars have names like Eeyore, Kanga and Winnie the Pooh.
“It’s a skill I learned while working on Star Wars,” Mr McGregor said.
That would be when he played Obi-Wan Kenobi, the young version of the character played by Alec Guinness in the original film, in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002) and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005).
There’s much less derring-do in Christopher Robin, in which he plays the grown-up version of the character A A Milne modeled on his own son, Christopher Robin Milne, in a series of books written nearly a century ago. The comedy/adventure co-stars Hayley Atwell as Robin’s wife, along with such voice talents as Jim Cummings, Brad Garrett, Toby Jones and Sophie Okonedo. The film is now playing at cinemas in Thailand.
To prepare for his scenes opposite stuffed animals, Mr McGregor had some help from director Marc Forster.
“Marc hired a little gang of actors from drama school to play the characters during rehearsals,” he said, speaking by telephone from his Los Angeles home. “They’d be holding a stuffed version of their creatures and manipulating them while saying their lines. That made the scenes really real for me. Then I’d do takes without them.”
The film starts with 7-year-old Christopher Robin leaving the 100 Acre Woods, saying goodbye to his friends and going off to boarding school.
“There’s a montage of him growing up over the next 40 years,” Mr McGregor said. “You see him bullied at school, going to college and meeting his wife, getting married and having a baby.
“Then he goes to war,” the actor continued. “When he comes back, you get a sense his relationship with his wife is strained. He’s somewhat shut off, and he’s distanced from his child.
“At that time men didn’t really express their feelings to anybody,” Mr McGregor added. “He’s drifting. He doesn’t enjoy his work. He has a terrible responsibility of trying to save many people’s jobs.”
At his lowest moment, however, Robin reconnects with Winnie the Pooh, who helps him figure out what’s important and what isn’t.
“By spending time with Pooh and his old buddies, the creatures, he finds his way to solving not only the problem at his company but his own unhappiness,” Mr McGregor said. “He finds his way back to his family as the place of priority in his life. I do think the film speaks to someone who has lost his way.”
Is Christopher Robin experiencing a midlife crisis? Maybe, but Mr McGregor — who at 47 is about the same age as his character — doesn’t think that midlife crises are limited to midlife.
“I’ve been having them since I was 20, with different projects and adventures and convertibles,” he said. “I still love getting on the open road and taking off, even if I’m just going to Whole Foods. I really enjoy getting there.”
Mr McGregor sounded like a kid, but insisted that the impression was misleading.
“I feel my age,” he said. “I’m different from the way I was when I was younger. I was frenetic in my youth, but I don’t feel that anymore.
“I feel my maturity,” the actor continued. “I’m quite content. I feel happy. Ask me in three years, when I turn 50.”
Mr McGregor’s happiness revolves around acting, to which he was drawn as a boy, growing up as the younger son of two teachers in Crieff, Scotland.
“I was a bit of a dreamer,” he recalled. “I did a lot of playing on my own. I spent a lot of time in the garden. I was always outside playing with my action men, thinking up stories.” He even has evidence to prove it.
“The other day I was cleaning out drawers in my old house in London,” he said, “and I found some pictures I’d taken of a police motorbike crash with my action man. I took photos from different angles. Another set of pictures showed an action man hanging from a parachute in a tree.
“Here I am in a profession where we set up scenes and we shoot them from different angles and try to tell a story.”
Mr McGregor credited his passion for acting to television.
“I spent a lot of time watching old movies,” he recalled. “On Saturdays and Sundays, BBC2 would show black-and-white American and British movies. I remember, in winter, being propped up on my elbows watching them. I loved romantic films where the stars were always falling in love.”
Many kids want to be actors, but Mr McGregor had a direct way into the business — his mother’s brother, actor Denis Lawson, who is best known as rebel pilot Wedge Antilles in
Star Wars (1977) and its first two sequels (yep, he survived the first Death Star attack).
“If Denis hadn’t been an actor, I don’t know if I would have become one,” Mr McGregor admitted. “He came from the same very small Scottish town, and I was following in his footsteps.
“I admired him as a person and wanted to be like him,” he continued. “He was different from everyone else I knew. When I told him, ‘I want to be an actor,’ he said, ‘Wait 10 years and come back and talk to me then.’”
Mr McGregor didn’t listen. He left school at 16 and began working as a stagehand at the nearby Perth Repertory Theatre. Eventually his uncle relented and began helping him with audition pieces.
“I was working on an angry speech from Jim Cartwright’s play Road (1986),” Mr McGregor recalled, “and my uncle was helping me. I wasn’t very good.
“I’d been in Glasgow a couple weeks before and got caught up in a fight,” he said. “I was punched rather seriously by this guy. I’d never had that experience before. My uncle started talking to me about that, what it felt like. He asked me if I had felt humiliated. He got me to talk about how I felt. Then he said, ‘Imagine that guy is right here. What would you say to him?’
“Eventually I started screaming at this imaginary guy,” Mr McGregor continued, “and my uncle said, ‘Now do the speech.’ I went straight into it, and suddenly I had all this real anger. I realised what acting was — not pretending to be angry. It was about being angry and feeling what your character is feeling.”
Mr McGregor went on to enroll at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, studying alongside Daniel Craig, among others. He left during his third year in order to play a foreign-affairs analyst in the hit British TV miniseries,
Lipstick on Your Collar (1993).
Then director Danny Boyle hired him to play a journalist in
Shallow Grave (1994), a heroin addict in Trainspotting (1996) and a janitor-turned-hostage-taker in A Life Less Ordinary
(1997).
Mr McGregor’s career has been filled with eclectic choices. He played an uninhibited American rock star in Velvet Gold
mine (1998) and a poet who falls in love with a courtesan in the musical Moulin Rouge (2001). In Black Hawk Down (2001) he was a US Ranger fighting in Somalia and in the romantic comedy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011), a fisheries expert.
“I just follow my instincts,” Mr McGregor said. “I’m inspired by stories I haven’t told or characters I haven’t played. I never strived to play Hollywood heroes.”
The closest he has come to superstardom was playing Obi-Wan. Lately there have been rumours of a stand-alone
Star Wars movie focused on this character with Mr McGregor returning to the role.
He denied any knowledge of such a project.
“I’d love to play Obi-Wan again,” he said. “I feel there would be a good story to tell that would bridge the gap between me and Alec Guinness, but it hasn’t been said to me that it’s going to happen.
“Since the last film came out,” he said, referring to Solo: A
Star Wars Story, “there has been a rethinking going on. I think they know I’d be happy to do it”.
Should he get the call, Mr McGregor would need to brush up on his lightsaber skills.
“I have my own lightsaber,” he said. “I asked the prop man to make me one, and we took it out the back door of the studio. I think it’s in storage.
“If I go to somebody’s house and the kids have lightsabers,” Mr McGregor added, “I’ll show them a few spins, things I remember. It doesn’t take much to impress a 5-year-old.”