The star said he’d made peace with director Danny Boyle and was definitely interested in playing Renton again.
The chances of seeing Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy and Spud altogether again on the big screen may be a step closer after Ewan McGregor said he would be keen to star in a sequel to cult hit Trainspotting.
Speaking at the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Scotsman reports that McGregor said he had patched up his differences with director Danny Boyle, a major hindrance to any sequel being made and described the opportunity to work with the original cast and director again as “extraordinary.” He added that any follow-up film could be the next movie that could take him back to shooting in Scotland.
“It might be the film that brings me back. I would be up for it, I’ve said that to Danny. Everybody has talked about it and speculated about it, but I don’t if it’s happening yet. I’ve not seen a script and I don’t know if there is one,” said McGregor.
Based on the book by Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting was the story of heroin addiction in the deprived parts of Edinburgh and made a star of McGregor and proved to be breakout roles for Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner and Jonny Lee Miller.
The film was the second of three collaborations between Boyle and McGregor, who also made Shallow Grave and A Life Less Ordinary together, but the pair famously fell out after the director cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead in The Beach, a part that was originally intended for McGregor.
On the subject of his relationship with Boyle, McGregor said: “It’s been a long, long time. I just think I’ve changed my opinion about it. We’ve all moved on and there is a lot of water under the bridge now.”
He added: “I miss working with Danny, I did some of my best work with him and he’s one of my favorite directors I’ve worked with. There was some bad blood and ill feeling, but that’s all gone now. I think it might be extraordinary to see a sequel 20 years after the original.”
Pressed on the issues that broke his and Boyle’s close working relationship, McGregor said: For years and years, I was [Boyle, Hodge, MacDonald’s] actor. It was more important to me than anything and it defined who I am as an actor. It set the bar very high for me and I’m always looking for that connection, that trust and the power of what you can come out with. You’ve no idea where it is coming from.”
The idea of a sequel to Trainspotting has been around since the author of the original books, Welsh, wrote Porno, the literary follow-up. McGregor has for years dismissed any suggestion of working on the project, but two years ago serious talk arose that Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge and producer Andrew MacDonald were working on a loose adaptation of Porno.
Category: Movies
The clock will not be without its candelabra.
Disney’s upcoming live-action musical adaptation of Beauty and the Beast has found its Lumiere in Ewan McGregor, who is nearing a deal to play the enchanted castle’s resident maître d’ in the March 2017 film, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Lumiere, of course, is the suave Frenchman-turned-candelabra who sings the showstopping “Be Our Guest” (among other notable songs). The womanizing candlestick holder is often side by side with his vastly more uptight cohort, Cogsworth, played in the film by Ian McKellen.
The showy role was the last major question mark in the buzzy 3D project, which will star Emma Watson as Belle, Dan Stevens as the Beast, Luke Evans as Gaston, Josh Gad as Le Fou, Emma Thompson as Mrs. Potts, Kevin Kline as Maurice, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Plumette, and Audra McDonald as Garderobe. Bill Condon will direct with a script by Stephen Chbosky and new songs (in addition to Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s originals from the 1991 animated film) by Menken and Tim Rice.
Beauty and the Beast is a return to the movie-musical for McGregor, who memorably sang as a lovelorn writer in 2001’s Moulin Rouge!
He was Obi Wan Kenobi, and he’s now playing Jesus in Sundance’s Last Days in the Desert, but Ewan McGregor tells Krista Smith he still got tongue tied when he met Prince Charles.
Have your doubts about that new Star Wars lightsaber? Well you’re not alone. Ewan McGregor, that’s right, Obi Wan Kenobi himself, jokingly says the updated design leaves much to be desired.
McGregor has moved on from his Kenobi days to play another famous robed figure in the sand: Jesus. The actor spoke with Vanity Fair senior west coast editor Krista Smith about his Sundance film Last Days in the Desert which he originally describes as just a story about a father and son. The film covers Jesus’s time in the wilderness before the beginning of his ministry and McGregor plays not only Christ, but Lucifer as well.
But the challenges of playing the Messiah may pale in comparison with the fright McGregor received in 2013 when getting an Order of the British Empire from Prince Charles. In the video above, McGregor goes into great detail about what the ceremony entails, should you ever find yourself in his shoes.
Ewan McGregor plays Jesus and Satan in this hushed, austere and stirringly beautiful drama from writer-director Rodrigo Garcia.
A filmmaker known primarily for his perceptive melodramas about women, from “Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her ” to “Mother and Child,” now turns his attention to a primal tale of fathers and sons — including the Son of Man himself — in “Last Days in the Desert,” a quietly captivating and remarkably beautiful account of Jesus’ time in the wilderness before the beginning of his ministry. Deliberately paced, sparely imagined and suffused with mystery, writer-director Rodrigo Garcia’s seventh feature is nonetheless quite lucid and accessible in its themes of empathy, compassion and sacrifice, and grounded by a Christ/Satan dual performance by Ewan McGregor that plays vastly better onscreen than it sounds on paper. While many will find the drama as arid as its parched surroundings, with a thoughtful and concerted marketing approach the picture might well appeal to art-minded nonbelievers and Christians open-minded enough to accept an off-Scripture narrative.
Certain to elicit the full range of reactions from the faithful and the skeptical alike, “Last Days in the Desert” approaches the figure of Christ — or Yeshua, as he’s referred to here — with tremendous care and tact, yet also with a scrupulous focus on his humanity rather than his divinity. Some may well discern a connection with “The Last Temptation of Christ,” though there’s nothing here that even remotely approaches that film’s controversy-stirring elements. This is a hushed, austere and surpassingly gentle treatment of a brief chapter of Jesus’ life — probably too subdued and speculative for those inclined to find profundity in the self-glorifying “realism” of “The Passion of the Christ,” but a vastly more considered and spiritually probing picture in every respect.
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Ewan McGregor will make his directorial feature film debut in Lakeshore Entertainment’s “American Pastoral” in addition to starring with Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning.
The long-in-development project is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel written by Philip Roth. Philip Noyce was previously attached to direct.
“Ewan’s talent goes far beyond his on-screen work and we’re excited to be working with a director who is as passionate as we are about telling the story of ‘American Pastoral,’” Lakeshore CEO Tom Rosenberg said.
“It’s a great privilege to be working with Lakeshore on Phillip Roth’s astounding novel ‘American Pastoral,’” McGregor said. “I’ve wanted to direct for years and wanted to wait until I found a story that I ‘had’ to tell and in this script I knew I had found that story.”
The screenplay was written by John Romano with filming scheduled for September in Pittsburgh, Pa. Producers aer Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi.
The story follows Seymour “Swede” Levov, a legendary high school athlete, who grows up to marry a former beauty queen and inherits his father’s business. His perfect life shatters when his daughter rebels by becoming a revolutionary and committing a deadly act of political terrorism during the Vietnam War.
