FAME SPOTTING
She rebelled against her movie star dad by posing for Playboy, trashing his new girlfriend – and swore she’d never act. Now she’s starring in a film with him, are Clara McGregor’s wild days behind her?
THE pretty young actress on the hospital bed was in bad shape. Rushed to the emergency room in Las Vegas after being bitten on the face by a dog, her wounds – deep, red cuts across her nose and cheek – were examined by a doctor before she was eventually discharged.
And yet only 30 minutes later the actress was not, as one might reasonably expect, back home on the couch with a tub of ice cream. Instead, she was walking the red carpet in a sleek Fendi trouser suit and looking every inch the budding Hollywood star, nasty cuts aside.
Such is a day in the life of Clara McGregor, the 25-year-old daughter of Scots superstar Ewan McGregor. And you could be forgiven for excusing her desperation to get to the movie premiere last Friday night. not only did it mark the debut of her biggest role to date, but she is playing opposite her father. The latter, or so the McGregors would have you believe, is sheer coincidence.
Half French, half Scottish and wholly a Hollywood wild child, Clara, the eldest daughter of Ewan and his ex-wife Eve Mavrakis has been making waves – primarily on social media – for a few years now, buoyed along by a sprinkling of the sort of stardust that only comes with being the child of a bona fide A-lister.
Indeed, some wags might even suggest Clara has become something of a poster child for nepotism, given that one of her earliest forays into the world of celebrity – this time as a model – involved her posing for a fashion campaign with Bob Dylan’s grandson Levi in a series of pictures by Mary McCartney, daughter of Paul.
Then there was a risqué shoot for Playboy at the age of 21 (‘I don’t care if people had an issue with it. I did exactly what I wanted to do’ she said defiantly), and since then she has appeared in a succession of small, independent films, as well as a few modelling jobs, including one for Fendi.
There was also a blink and you’ll miss it part in the 2018 blockbuster Christopher Robin, starring, you guessed it, one Ewan McGregor.
Her latest movie however, The Birthday Cake, which as well as both McGregors features Hollywood veteran Val Kilmer and actress Ashley Benson, is something of a step up.
A project almost two years in the making and already being trailed as one of the biggest summer movies by USA Today before its release, it could just be the film to put McGregor junior firmly on the map. That it is directed by Jimmy Giannopoulos, who happens to be Clara’s boyfriend, is presumably also purely coincidence.
All in all, it’s not bad going for a woman who said she never wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps in the first place.
‘All throughout high school I really turned my back on acting. I said I was going to be a photographer, I’m going to be behind the lens,’ she said once. ‘At 12 years old, I moved to LA, which is all Hollywood and all I was asked is, “Are you going to do what your dad does?” I was rebelling.’
InDEED, rebelling does seem to be something of a trademark for Clara, whose long, glossy locks and elegant, angular features contain more than a hint of her French mother.
She first came to public attention in the wake of her father’s messy split from Mavrakis, after he was photographed getting extremely cosy with his Fargo co-star, Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
The McGregors subsequently divorced, a protracted affair that was clearly unsettling for all the family.
A few months after the photographs emerged, Clara left an incendiary comment under a picture of Winstead at the 2014 Vanity Fair Oscars after-party that had been shared by a fan account on Instagram.
‘Most beautiful and talented woman on earth???’ she wrote. ‘Oh man y’all are delusional. The girl is a piece of trash :) x.’
When a fan of Winstead’s responded saying that it took two to undo the marriage, Clara replied: ‘Yup it took two!! Mary & my father :)’.
The comments raised eyebrows. For years the McGregors’ marriage had been extremely private, and the couple had gone to great lengths to shield their four children (Clara, Esther, 19, Jamyan, 19, and Anouk, nine) from the harsh media glare that comes with a life in the spotlight.
That it was the Perthshire-born actor’s eldest daughter who had commented publicly about the split (McGregor has yet to acknowledge it and has taken great care not to be seen publicly with Winstead, although the couple are apparently still together) then, was surprising.
Clara, for her part, later apologised for her remarks.
‘It wasn’t the most mature way to go about things, but I was angry and upset,’ she said.
‘There had been a lot building up to it and a lot to deal with, not to make excuses or anything, but, yeah, it wasn’t my finest moment.
‘I kept being tagged in this photograph and I was seeing negative things about my mum. I said how I felt and I didn’t want to apologise for it.
‘It wasn’t the right way to go about things, but it’s a hard thing to wrap your head around when you feel you had this idea of what the family unit is and then to have that shift. It’s very weird.’
She also stuck by her comment that both Winstead and her father were responsible for the fact the family is no longer together.
‘I’d say they were both to blame. It was never one-sided,’ she says. ‘I dealt with stuff with my dad personally – it wasn’t me letting it slide with him and just getting mad at her. Of course not.’
McGregor was only 24 years old when he married French production designer Mavrakis, whom he had met on the set of British TV show Kavanagh QC, before he hit the big time thanks to roles in Danny Boyle
movies Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.
Clara followed a year later, and much of her early life was spent on the road, as her father’s burgeoning film career went from strength to strength.
‘My mum, a designer, had me under her arm for every film she was working on in London, and we used to travel with my dad wherever he would work,’ Clara revealed in a recent interview.
‘We were in Australia for three separate years for the Stars Wars films and Moulin Rouge and we were in Alabama when Dad filmed Big Fish.’
When the family stayed at home, first in London and later in Los Angeles while McGregor went abroad for filming, he always kept in touch.
‘He was always very good about calling, and skyping and FaceTiming when that became a thing. He was, and is, a very present dad.’
It was this somewhat itinerant early life that instilled the acting bug in Clara, even if she claims she tried to resist it, and that her parents tried to talk her out of it.
‘When I was growing up, if I ever brought up wanting to be an actor my parents were like, “Oh God. It’s really hard.” They never sugarcoated that. My dad got lucky in his career. He’s very talented but it’s also down to luck. It’s incredibly hard to make it.
‘Both my parents made it really clear to me, especially as a woman, that I should have a back-up plan, go to college and have something else I can fall back on. I definitely fought it for a while. I just didn’t want to do what my dad did, so I was, “I’m going to be a photographer. I’m going to be behind the camera”.’
With that in mind Clara enrolled at New York University, although wise owls might say that given her choice of course was cinema studies, she perhaps already knew where her heart lay.
In 2019, she came out as bisexual (the revelation was announced when her sister Esther, then 17, posted on Instagram that she was bisexual, to which Clara responded ‘I’m bisexual too. Carry on!’).
SHE later expanded, saying: ‘I went downstairs one morning and said, “I’m going on a date with this girl”. Mum was like, “Oh, OK” and it was fine. My dad was ecstatic. He loved the idea. He was just very supportive of it and happy, he was just like it was all good.’
And indeed Dad – phew! – has also been supportive of her acting career.
‘Now I’ve made it clear there’s nothing else I want to do, they are incredibly supportive,’ she said of both her parents. That’s just as well, given that some of her recent projects have drawn on family traumas, such as the short film she wrote about a girl whose dad decided to leave her mum. Talk about close to the bone.
‘It’s about realising that your parents aren’t perfect and how to cope with that,’ she said of the script, while admitting she wasn’t sure how comfortable her dad was with the subject matter.
‘I told him the idea. I think he’s happy I’m making art and creating, and that’s how I’m processing things. He’s supportive, for sure.’
Perhaps, in Hollywood, that’s just how families work out their differences. Clearly, father and daughter have made up since those unguarded remarks about her father’s partner several years back.
There is another project in the works too: a screenplay Clara wrote which was inspired by her experience with addiction to Xanax.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the story is about a father and daughter on a road trip to take her to a rehab facility. McGregor père is, naturally, the executive producer.
Whether The Birthday Cake will make Clara’s name is yet to be seen. But she does credit making the film with changing her relationship with her father.
‘I’d always denied myself of wanting [to be an actor] through a desire to be different from my dad,’ she said in a cosy interview with Giannopoulos, who directed her in the film and with whom she has been in a relationship for three years. The couple live in Los Angeles with their dog. There is no suggestion that their pooch is the culprit in the dog bite incident.
‘He’s such an incredible actor and I wanted to make my own mark on the industry,’ she said. ‘I realised I could learn so much from my dad and I didn’t have to deny myself this career path that I had been suppressing for so long. I still love photography but I need more than one frame per second.’
At The Birthday Cake premiere last Friday night there was, in fact, a third McGregor in attendance, doing the rounds among the Hollywood elite. Sister Esther recently released an EP of songs written in both French and English, and has also ventured into modelling.
Clearly, there is plenty more of the McGregor clan to come. All on their own merits, of course.
‘My dad got lucky — it’s hard to make it’