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Ewan Mcgregor is a Russian aristocrat imprisoned in a luxury hotel after the Bolshevik revolution
A Gentleman in Moscow From Good Friday 29 March, Paramount+ (released weekly)
We last saw Ewan Mcgregor travelling through the vast reaches of space as Star Wars’ Obi-wan Kenobi – but the location for his latest TV role couldn’t be more different.
In Paramount+’s period drama A Gentleman in Moscow, the Scottish star is confined to quarters as a Russian aristocrat imprisoned in a Moscow hotel for more than three decades after being caught on the wrong side of history.
HOUSE ARREST
Based on the bestselling novel by Amor Towles, the eight-part drama follows the fictional Count Alexander Rostov, who returns to his homeland in 1921 following the country’s Bolshevik revolution. As a member of the upper class,
Count Rostov is immediately placed on trial, but he narrowly avoids execution when it transpires he wrote a communist poem in his youth.
Instead, he’s told me must live out the rest of his days in a grotty attic room of the otherwise opulent Moscow Metropol and warned that if he ever steps outside, he’ll be shot… ‘The tale takes place over the next 35 years of Count Rostov’s life in that amazing hotel,’ says Mcgregor, 52. ‘It’s a story about him finding his way in his imprisonment and coming to terms with it over a long, long period of time. I can’t think of any drama like it.’
NEW FRIEND
The series, which is set almost entirely inside the Moscow Metropol, was mainly shot on a Manchester sound stage, with 19th-century buildings in Leeds, Bolton and Halifax also used for scenes. In the first episode, Rostov befriends a young inquisitive girl, Nina (Alexa Goodall). Her father is a committed communist who constantly leaves her to her own devices while he’s working for the new regime.
‘The Count’s friendship with Nina really helps him,’ explains Mcgregor. ‘Nina shows him all of this hidden life in the hotel, all these shortcuts and passageways and secret rooms. She opens up the life of the hotel to him, but also her mind and his mind come together in a nice way.’
As Nina grows up, she becomes more indoctrinated in communist ideology and disappears from the Count’s life after a falling out. However, years later, Nina returns with her daughter, Sofia.
‘She tells the Count her husband has been taken to the Gulag camps in Siberia,’ says Mcgregor. ‘She wants to try to find him, so asks the Count to look after her daughter for a few weeks.
We watch him struggling with looking after a child at first. It’s a drama about love and our children growing up and having to let them go.’
MODERN ROMANCE
The other great passion of Rostov’s life is actor Anna Urbanova, who’s played by Mcgregor’s real-life wife, Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
‘Their relationship is so baffling to the Count, because she’s such a modern woman and he is a very un-modern man,’ reveals Mcgregor. ‘You can never really pin down what this relationship is. But it turns into the greatest love of either of their lives. And I can’t tell you how perfect it felt to play this beautiful romance with my wife. It doesn’t get any better than that.’