Ewan McGregor Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

Hi, I'm Ewan McGregor.

And these are some of my

characters that I've played.

I'm not gonna call 'em iconic, you can.

[upbeat music]

Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The last two questions of every interview I ever did

for years was, Would you do the sequel to Trainspotting?

and Would you ever play Obi-Wan Kenobi again?

Almost guaranteed that would be the last two questions

that people would sneak in at the end

when the publicist's saying, That's time's up.

So I would always answer honestly,

and Disney called me in eventually

to the Lucasfilm office in LA.

And I sat down with a lady called Keary

and she just said, Look, we can see that you're saying

that you would play Obi-Wan again.

We just want to know if you mean it.

Do you want to?

And I said, Yes, I think there's gotta be

a good story to tell between Episode Three and Episode Four.

There's gotta be some great story there.

If we took this character that people know and love

from Alec Guinness

as this wise, old, sage, powerful, spiritual man,

the work that I did in one to three

from a trainee Jedi Padawan,

to somebody sitting on the Jedi council with Yoda,

we take him to a broken place

that he's faithless and broken.

That would be interesting.

That'd be a good, interesting place to start.

The fight is done.

We lost.

What happened to you?

You were once a great Jedi.

The time of the Jedi is over.

It was originally gonna be a movie.

Stephen Daldry was gonna direct it at one point.

We had sort of workshops in New York

where we did brainstorming for story lines,

and then Deborah Chow came onboard

and she sort of worked with the writers in one direction.

Then it switched to a very different story.

She's really a brilliant director.

Her vision goes through all of the -

she directed all the episodes, which I think was key.

You know, she's really, really good.

But playing him was easier in a way,

because, I think the sort of broken Obi-Wan Kenobi,

the solitary lonely character we find

at the beginning of the series

is a bit closer to Alec Guinness's Obi-Wan Kenobi

than my sort of swash-buckley General Kenobi that I -

running around on lizards and stuff.

So I loved it very much.

And I - I've always got to feel Alec Guinness in my head

or sitting on my shoulder wherever he is.

I've got to, I've got to feel like him

to whatever degree when I'm playing the role.

And I just felt that bit closer to him.

There's more to life than your farm, Owen.

He needs to see that there's a whole galaxy out there.

I am asking you to leave us alone, Ben.

I mean it.

Is he okay?

You don't care if he's okay.

You care if he's showing.

He's my responsibility, Owen.

Well, I'm his uncle.

We talked about this.

When the time comes he must be trained.

Now after we've just finished

doing this television series with the stagecraft set,

we're surrounded by this huge dome

that is an LCD screen that they play the backgrounds onto

which connected to the camera,

it reads the Iris on the camera,

it reads the movement of the camera.

So as the camera moves,

the perspective of the background will move,

and you shoot against it,

and you don't have to put it on afterwards.

It's there.

But for us, it means you're surrounded by

by what feels like the real thing.

[Storm Trooper] Raise your head.

I said, raise your head.

If you're in the desert,

well, there's a desert set on the floor and everything,

but everywhere you look around you

and above you is the desert, and it feels really real.

But if you're flying through space in your spaceship,

space is scudding past you.

The stars are flying by you.

It feels much more realistic.

It's much more fun.

Big Fish.

Big Fish was my first time in the south.

It was my first time in Alabama anyway, and I loved it.

I asked them to rent me a pickup truck,

and I drove myself to work in my pickup truck every day.

Oh, I loved it.

It was great.

It was amazing working with Tim Burton.

I've always hoped that that might happen again,

and I still hope so.

I mean, I love his imagination,

and I think it's a really important film for me.

It's a, it's a film that a lot of men like,

and I think cuz it's so much about a father and a son,

some people come up to speak to me

thinking about their dads.

And sometimes people are talking about their sons,

but it seems to hit a chord.

And that's, that's really nice when that happens.

Also, I got to make fantastical things happen.

I got to work with elephants in a circus,

and it was just an amazing experience to do.

[whimsical music]

I loved working with Tim Burton

because when he's between action and cut,

it was just a sense of play.

There was never really a sense

of trying to get something right.

It just felt like he's so free.

He's sort of like a mad professor

and sort of tearing his hair out

about getting to shoot

because the Jenny goes down

and the light's not working and this, that and the other.

And I can remember him,

his hair would get higher and higher during the day

as he - cuz' it's this impatience to shoot.

One thing that I'd never forget

is making it into the local newspaper for,

for parallel parking so badly.

There's the scene where I drive up with Steve Buscemi

in the charger, and I have to reverse into a spot.

Apparently, I didn't do that very well.

And it was written about Mr. McGregor

is not a very good parker.

Halston.

Jeans are a fad, Valenciaga didn't do fads

and neither will I.

A fad?

I mean, look at Calvin Klein, he sold -

Do not come into my office, David,

and mention that man's name.

I didn't know who Halston was

when I was first approached about the series.

And I think that's possibly why I found him

so interesting because Dan Minahan, the director,

was showing me these photographs

of this man who was not -

a clearly very glamorous,

pictures of him arriving at Studio 54

with people taking his pictures.

And he described him as the most famous man

you've never heard of.

I've always found that photographs are very useful

in terms of, if you're playing somebody

who's really existed.

Yeah, of course you can watch interviews.

You can listen to their voice.

There's something that a photograph can capture

that tells you a lot about somebody

and with Halston, it was very much his hands.

His fingers were always in the most beautiful position.

Yes.

I have this feeling like he sort of curated his life.

He liked to have camera crews around.

He started filming everything.

So there's lots of footage of him.

I had my hair darkened to play him cuz he had dark hair.

So when we went back from lockdown, I went back to LA.

I thought, at first, we were told,

we're shutting down for two weeks.

[laughs]

But the first thing I did was after,

once I realized it wasn't gonna be quick that we went back,

I wanted to try and lighten my hair

because I - it's odd when you're you,

but you don't look like you.

It's fine if you're working on something.

But when I was just off I,

so I went to the supermarket

and I got some hair lightener.

I just bought it off the shelf.

I thought, this'll do.

I made my hair totally peroxide -

like yellow-white, you know?

This like, shit, and the nightmare

that they might call me back to work soon.

And I would be turning back out

with this like orangey-white hair.

Oh my God.

Now hold this.

Put your neck there.

Our costume designer, Jeriana, was amazing

at teaching me how to make the dresses

that I am seen making in the show.

I can't learn to be a amazing dress maker in a few months.

So what we did is we took each,

each time you see me draping.

And I just learned how to make those dresses

like how you would drape them.

And also just the act of pinning, I had to look like

I knew what I was doing.

I didn't want my hands to sort of give me away.

You know, he was so graceful

and I loved all the images of him

and he was always sort of behind one of his models

or whoever he was draping.

And look, he was really focused in the mirror.

And he had this,

he had this thing where he sort of sucked in beauty.

You could see that his eye just looked

for beautiful things and shapes.

And so, he was always peering around somebody's hair,

looking in the mirror,

and his fingers were pinning the dress.

And he wasn't looking like,

like I would be doing to pin a dress.

So those scenes made me very feel quite close to him.

Birds of Prey.

I knew I was gonna be playing Halston

when I made Birds of Prey.

And so I might have been,

I certainly was thinking about Halston a bit.

Is that a snot bubble?

Ew, gross.

Oh, I've changed my mind.

Peel it off.

There was something similar about the grandiosity, maybe.

I think Roman wanted everything to be in his control,

and I'm pretty sure Halston was like that about his work.

It was just fun to play Roman.

I liked that he could lose his temper in like,

in a blinking of an eye,

but really he goes from zero to a hundred with,

in a split second.

There she is.

She's a child!

It's just a kid.

She's what?

We have Harley Quinn downstairs as requested.

Fuck off!

Get out!

Fucking out!

Fuck, these are my things.

This diamond is my things.

Yes.

My things.

Fucking fuck!

I don't ask for much, do I?

There's lots of stuff that we improvised

in that film that didn't make it into the film, sadly.

We did the - we improvised this whole hide and seek game

in my apartment.

We had this idea that when they were super high

after getting back from the club,

they'd play hide and seek.

He was pretty good on the page,

but there was more fun to be had with him.

And I love the petulant, spoiled nature of him.

And that is written.

The writing with his backstory

that he came from a very -

he was kicked out of his family

for being the black sheep of the family.

And he doesn't think he's a bad guy.

He thinks he's just - he just wants to take over the world.

So yeah, it was fun to play all those moments.

Thank you, GQ, for letting me talk through some

of my characters that I've played over the years.

Check out me talking about some of my other characters

on the British GQ channel.