Five star turns

McGregor’s masterstrokes...

Trainspotting 1996 Having worked with Danny Boyle on his dark 1994 thriller Shallow Grave, the 24-year-old McGregor – then in a “brilliant, youthful, ruling the world kind of mood” – was happy to shed 30 pounds, and his hair, to play heroin addict Mark Renton in his landmark adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s junkie classic. Velvet Goldmine

1998 Playing hard-living American singer Curt Wild – a flamboyant amalgam of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Kurt Cobain – in Todd Haynes’ glam-rock oddity gave McGregor a chance to live out his dreams of music stardom. “I thought it would expel the rock ‘n’ roll demons but it just put more in me,” he admits. Moulin Rouge!

2001 “It felt like we were in a circus,” says McGregor of Baz Luhrmann’s epic musical, a riot of colour and craziness that not only saw the actor share tender love scenes with Nicole Kidman but also led to them spending three weeks in the Top 40 with the David Baerwald-penned ballad ‘Come What May’. Big Fish 2003 Having played the young Alec Guinness in two Star Wars prequels, McGregor was well-primed to play a youthful Albert Finney in Tim Burton’s fantastical shaggy-dog story. “I was playing somebody’s memory of himself, where he’s a helluva good guy and everything’s through rose-tinted spectacles,” he says of his “challenging” role. The Impossible

2012 Naomi Watts may have got an Oscar nod for J.A. Bayona’s harrowing recreation of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, but it was McGregor who arguably did the heavy lifting as the dad toiling to piece his shattered family together. (The father-offour calls the film his “first real exploration of parenthood”.)