Ewan McGregor
"Far From a Padawan (Beginner)"
Scottish actor Ewan McGregor’s past work in Trainspotting to Velvet Goldmine to Moulin Rouge! to a Down With Love to the Star Wars prequel trilogy has garnered him a reputation for playing roles that are a mix of charming and intense.
Now the 40 year-old plays his most domestic and subtle role yet as Oliver, a man dealing with both his love life and the fact that his recently widowed father is not only actually gay, but dying from terminal cancer in the drama Beginners. McGregor talks about how coming to terms with being gay has radically changed in America in the past fifty years.
“Well, there’s something right about our society now in that people are coming out,” Ewan believes, “And I think in the film, [writer/director] Mike [Mills] looks back at his father’s history and looks at very specifically what it might have been like to be a homosexual man in the early 1950′s in America and the pressures that led him to feeling that he had to suppress that.”
“Homosexuality was considered to be a mental illness and people were arrested for sitting in a coffee house together, in a gay coffee house together,” he continues, “People were thrown in the back of police vans and it would ruin your life. It would be the stigma that was attached to it. Well, that’s changed and it’s changing and so I think the reasons, and it’s very personal for every single individual that causes a gay man to not come out and to try and live some idea of a normal life. It’s changing.”
Playing Oliver’s father Hal is Canadian actor Christopher Plummer, who has appeared on the stage on Broadway in plays like Cyrano and Inherit The Wind, as well as in films like The Sound Of Music, The Insider, Up, and The Last Station, the last of which garnered him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Ewan discussed his experience of working with the
Ewan McGregor
"Far From a Padawan (Beginner)"
veteran actor.“It’s really, really wonderful, because he’s a fantastic man and a great actor,” he says of him, “And although he’s been acting, he tells stories about the people he used to work with. He was in Hollywood in the fifties and sixties and he worked with some incredible people. But he’s a very modern actor. He’s a very contemporary actor.”
“And when we were playing the scenes, I didn’t feel like I was playing scenes with an older actor who’s giving a great performance,” McGregor adds, “And he really gives a great performance in this film, absolutely fantastic. I felt like I was working with my dad in those scenes. I was Oliver, he was my dad. He’s a very modern, contemporary actor to work with.”
Plummer is well-known for refusing to be pigeonholed by his best known role as Captain Georg Von Trapp in the classic film The Sound Of Music. McGregor was asked if that made it difficult carrying conversations with the actor.
“No, because I don’t think of him just from that film,” Ewan says, “I didn’t come with any kind of judgment or ideas. I try not to do that ever. I find him to be the most charming man, a lovely man.”
Ewan was also asked whether director Mike Mills, a former music video and short film director whose previous feature film was the comedy/drama Thumbsucker gave him leeway to bring more to the table for the role. The role of Oliver is loosely based on Mills himself and Beginners is based on the director’s own experience with his father coming out as an old man before his death.
“You always bring more than what’s on the page because the page is just words and you’re a human being,” McGregor says, “So that’s our job is to do that and that’s something that we always do, but there was never any pressure from Mike to make kind of an impersonation of him or to
Ewan McGregor
"Far From a Padawan (Beginner)"
copy him in any way. He wanted the character to be my character, for me to have the freedom to create Oliver as I wanted to. But I did want him to be like Mike.”“I wanted him to sound like him and to move like him,” he continues, “And although, I think if you walked into our film set, if you didn’t know what was going on, I don’t think you would look at me and look at Mike and say, ‘Oh, he’s playing him.’ It wasn’t like that, but I worked on his voice. I had Mike record all the dialogue, so I could listen to that and work on his accent, work on his voice, and then, I would watch him and I’m trying to incorporate some of his physicality into what I was doing.”
McGregor also explained how Mills’s conversations about his own family history helped in the shaping of his performance as Oliver.
“We talked a lot about his life and memories of being a child and his mother,” Ewan says, “We talked a lot about his mother. I’m not really involved in the scenes because Oliver, as the young boy who’s brilliant, and the mother, she’s brilliant in the film. But I wasn’t in those scenes, but it was important to know who Oliver was and where he came from. So we did talk about that a lot.”
In the film, Oliver has a pet dog named Arthur. Ewan talks about what it was like to work with the dog that played Oliver’s pet.
“There’s technical ways you can work with animals and part of that is little treats or it’s actually bits of his food,” he reveals, “And so you have treats and food and you do the thing when you feed the dog. It’s a little bit of food, but you feed him when you hold the food up to you inbetween your eyes and you feed him like that. So
Ewan McGregor
"Far From a Padawan (Beginner)"
when he looks at you, he’s looking where the food came from, he looks at your hands. Otherwise, he might follow your hands.”“And the other thing about Cosmo, who’s got a lovely, little, amazing character, that dog, when you are making a film, you have to have two dogs for the insurance, so you had another dog that looked the same,” McGregor continues, “And Cosmo, in fact, is a white dog. It doesn’t have any brown, so there’s an animal colorist in L.A., of course. And then, there was another dog that was colored the same way. He was a sweet dog and everything, but he didn’t have nearly the character of Cosmo. So when we were acting with him, and it was very rarely that we did, we were like, what’s wrong with this big void. And he just didn’t have the character that Cosmo had.”
McGregor was then asked if he had wanted to take home either of the dogs that played Arthur.
“I did,” he answers, “My very first idea about the film with Mike was that maybe we could rescue a dog and then, use that dog in the film and I would keep the dog afterwards because I would really like to have a dog, but my wife’s allergic to dogs. Cosmo’s a long-haired dog and he sheds. And so, I did find a little rescue dog on the last day of our shoot.”
“I found a little dog called Sid who’s my dog now, and really replaced Cosmo,” Ewan adds, “I do see Cosmo every now and again with Sid, but I found a real Cosmo replacement, but he’s the same size, he’s white, it’s just like having Cosmo around. It’s funny. And he’s also got very strong character.”
Ewan was also asked about whether his children took to Sid.
“Oh, yeah, absolutely,” McGregor replies, “He’s a member of the family now.”
Despite the fact that Plummer’s character Hal reveals himself to be a
Ewan McGregor
"Far From a Padawan (Beginner)"
closeted gay man throughout his marriage to his wife, he was faithfully married to his wife from young age until the day she died. McGregor shared his theory as to why he believes Hal’s marriage lasted, despite his secretly being homosexual.“I think the marriage lasted so long because they had a partnership and their marriage absolutely worked on the levels it worked on,” Ewan believes, “Mike talks very fondly about his mum and dad in the film and you see him looking back on his relationship with his mum, mainly because she wasn’t around to talk to anymore about it, but I think it was a functioning marriage and it worked to the purposes that it was there for.”
“And Mike talks very fondly about his parents and about his dad and about his dad after he came out,” he continues, “And when he came out, he refers to him as his gay dad. His gay dad was more emotionally available to him and more present in his life maybe than when he was repressing his sexuality.”
Unlike most actors who make it to Hollywood, Ewan has been married to the same woman for 16 years. Though he feels that the idea of his marriage lasting being an accomplishment cheapens it.
“I don’t feel like our marriage is an accomplishment,” McGregor states, “An accomplishment sounds like an effort or something. I’m just in love with my wife and I’m in love with her now. And I’m very lucky that we found each other. But this film looks at marriage from a different perspective, you’re right. But I still think there was love in their marriage. I think, obviously, it was complicated. Of course it was.”
“But as Mike says, his two sisters, who are not done up here in the film, they are not in the script and they’re older than him, ten years and seven years older than him,” he continues, “So, his parents, his gay father and
Ewan McGregor
"Far From a Padawan (Beginner)"
his straight mother, had his sisters and then, seven years later, had Mike as an accident, he’s a product of their recreational sex. That’s what he said. I think people imagine that it was a terrible marriage and a terrible struggle, but there they are, they were fooling around.”Finally, McGregor shared how he feels, in light of the message of Beginners, why gay marriage is still an issue in American society.
“I find it difficult to understand why it would even be an issue,” Ewan says, “I don’t know why we would not support gay marriage. Marriage is a union of two people who are in love with each other, that’s all. I really don’t, in my life, have any prejudice against sexuality. I never had. Religion should be more about love and less about all of the stuff that it seems to bring around in the world.”
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