Ewan Mcgregor ‘nearly dropped from first film role as being too good-looking’
It was the film that propelled Ewan Mcgregor into the limelight as Scotland’s hottest film star of the 1990s.
But now Scots movie mogul Andrew Macdonald has revealed that Mcgregor's film career was nearly derailed before it got off the ground after Channel 4 wanted him ditched as the star of Shallow Grave and the production “ran out of money”.
Speaking in a new BBC Scotland documentary, he revealed that he had to borrow props from his parents’ house for the making of the movie, which also launched the career of director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge.
In the documentary, fronted by Kirsty Wark, Macdonald said they had also come under pressure to drop Mcgregor as the star of Trainspotting as he was seen as too good-looking for the role.
The next instalment of the BBC Scotland series, The Years That Changed Modern Scotland, examines the cultural revolution that unfolded in Scotland in the 1990s and recalls a golden era for Scottish film thanks to the worldwide success of Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, Rob Roy and Braveheart.
Macdonald and Hodge started developing Shallow Grave after meeting at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1991. Although set in Edinburgh, most of the 30-day shoot was in Glasgow due to its low budget.
Macdonald said: “Channel 4 had a real wobble about Ewan Mcgregor and Christopher Eccleston at the time, which is a hard thing to believe and is how things change.
“We literally were running out of film. I had to keep the film in my office and sort of give it out as there was no more. The office was a Portakabin in a warehouse in Maryhill.
“We did literally run out of money. I had to take a prop truck to my parents’ house and fill it up with coffee cups, candelabras and all these other things because we’d built this huge flat and didn’t have enough money to fill it.”
Macdonald, Boyle and Hodge reunited to make Trainspotting, and would also work together with Mcgregor on A Life Less Ordinary before a much-publicised rift with the director when Leonardo Dicaprio was chosen for the lead role in their fourth film, The Beach.
Recalling the making of Trainspotting, Macdonald said: “A friend of mine gave me the book when we were finishing Shallow Grave. It was about young people. I loved the fact it was written in the vernacular and it was funny.
"We made that decision [to cast Mcgregor], which was very controversial, because lots of people thought it had to be really grungy. They thought Ewan was too handsome, too attractive, too pretty.”
The 1996 black comedy was based on the 1993 novel of the same title by Irvine Welsh and follows a group of heroin addicts in Edinburgh.
The film was ranked tenth by the British Film Institute in its list of Top 100 British films of the 20th century. In 2004, the film was voted the best Scottish film of all time in a general public poll.
Although set in Edinburgh, almost all of the film was shot in Glasgow, apart from the opening scenes which were shot in Edinburgh, and the final scenes which were shot in London.