Did you spend time with any chefs to prep for your part in Perfect Sense?
I worked with an old friend of mine, Guy Cowans. He has a place called Guy’s in Glasgow, and he’s also a movie-set caterer in Britain. He became the chef advisor for the movie, for all of the sequences in the kitchen. So I worked with him for about a week, observing, about two or three hours a night, and I actually ended up helping out. I spent a few nights doing service, when it got really chaotic. [Laughs.] I used to be a dishwasher and a waiter when I was 14, 15, 16, so I do have some experience with that, but it’s fascinating to watch them keep the orders straight — what steak to cook for how long and all of that. It’s really quite something to see. So I was taught how to make several dishes that we incorporated into the scenes. Guy orchestrated most of it; we wanted it to be realistic, for our movements to make sense, so it looked like we knew what we were doing.

You reunited with Ewen Bremner — Spud in Trainspotting — and you act for the first time with your uncle, Denis Lawson …
That was just delicious. I’ve waited my whole life to act with Denis. He’s directed me [Solid Geometry, Little Malcolm & His Struggle Against the Eunuchs], but Denis is the reason I’m an actor. He’s my inspiration. He’s the only person to speak to about acting. And Ewen, this is our third film together. We’re also in Jack the Giant Killer, acting up a storm together. He pushes himself physically, and goes to great lengths, so he’s really exciting to watch.

You both push yourselves to great lengths in the food-frenzy scene. What on earth are you guys eating?
That was actually olive oil he was pouring down his throat! He’s not swallowing it, but it looks like he is, doesn’t it? My jar of “mustard” was actually custard. It’s all stuff you could eat. The guys in the fish market, they were eating big lumps of raw fish, because that’s difficult to substitute, so the fish stuff was real. Disgusting, huh? I was lucky not to have to do that one. Oh, and the soap — we didn’t have to eat soap. That was a bar of white chocolate, with some kind of foam on it that Guy uses in cooking.

Eating soap is not on my to-do list, although it’s a sweet scene in the bathtub. It made me think about how much your sense of smell and taste affect things like falling in love, memories …
It’s really brilliant. It’s a simple metaphor, that when you fall in love, you lose your senses. We can’t eat, we can’t sleep, and it just takes us over. And that would have been good enough, but then the way David Mackenzie shot it was so believable and true, and it somehow elevated the idea way above what I expected. It was a very deep, moving experience. People come up to me and tell me they’ve had entirely different reactions to it. Some people think it’s about mourning the different phases of your life. It just taps into something interesting about the human condition, and it’s very unique.

What’s your favorite smell or taste, the one you would most hate to lose?
For smell? Oil. Oil and leather. Old metal. Like an oily, old car, an old motorcar or motorcycle. The way when you get off and it cools off, it gives off a rich aroma. For taste? Probably something like a boiled egg with toast, or an avocado with lemon and salt.

There have been a lot of apocalyptic and postapocalyptic scenarios on film lately, but they’re usually played for thrills. This is much more a love story. And you’ve got lots of sex scenes with Eva …
When the world’s about to end, the only thing Eva and I can think about is each other, the need for each other, to fall in each other’s arms. We’ve been reluctantly falling in love, and against our better judgment, at the end of the day — literally at the end of the day for them — what we find is true love. And sex is part of that, an important part of that. It’s as intrinsic to this story as music is in Moulin Rouge. I don’t shy away from being naked. The Pillow Book, that was about a woman’s sexuality, and the idea of not being naked in that is ludicrous. If instead of being naked, you’re clutching at a bed sheet, that’s nonsense. But I don’t like to see the generic Hollywood sex scenes with the bodies glistening — sex is not like it is in some Hollywood movies! Sometimes it’s messy, sometimes it’s guilty, sometimes it’s embarrassing, and you’ve got to tap into that.

You’ll probably have lots of room to explore all of that on The Corrections.
Yeah, but I don’t think we’ll have to go out of our way. [Laughs.] I haven’t seen many of the scripts yet, but it feels like it’s going to be accurate to the book, and really detailed. Jonathan Franzen’s writing it with Noah [Baumbach], and it looks like we’ll have the luxury of time to push deeper through the book and explore parts of the story that aren’t in it. That’ll be a first.

I was surprised you took the role: I thought you turned down being James Bond in Casino Royale because you didn’t want to commit long-term to a role?
Ah, but I didn’t turn down Bond. When they were casting it, they spoke to me, and I was one of the actors they considered, but they never quite offered it to me. It’s an urban myth!

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A dirty old man’s laugh honks down the hotel corridor, as if someone has just told a rude joke. That someone is Ewan McGregor, who now opens the door of his suite. “Come in, come in,” he says, his eyes still creased into laughter lines. “We were just … ” He never says quite what they were “just … “, but good humour hangs in the air like a party streamer. McGregor offers a handshake which percolates with the enthusiasm.

Dressed in a black T-shirt that sits tight on his lean frame, jeans cuffed at the ankle and black bovver boots, which he slams on the coffee table in front of him, he really doesn’t look that far removed from Renton, the character from Trainspotting that made him famous more than 16 years ago. Not that he looks like a heroin addict. But the clothes, the boots on the table, the pasty skin — the only difference might be a good haircut. Even at 40 years old, he doesn’t seem to have aged at all. Los Angeles, which is where we are now and where he is living, appears to agree with him.

In a 20-year career, McGregor has made nearly 50 films — an exhausting average of two movies a year. In the past he’s been accused of being a little “promiscuous” with his film choices, and it’s made him a little defensive. (“Can you tell me why it is ridiculous for an actor who’s working to work a lot?” he once said, not without justification. “Why is it?”)

Today, McGregor is fresh from an all-too-rare four-month break — which could also explain his youthful, carefree demeanour. “I finished shooting a film in September, and I just felt I’d worked my a*** off for years,” he explains. “I felt like I just hadn’t stopped. Which I hadn’t. And I realised one day that I didn’t have to work if I didn’t want to. It was like the sky suddenly opening up. I called my wife and suggested that I didn’t work for the rest of the year. And it’s been lovely.”

“Lovely” is a word that appears often in McGregor’s vocabulary. As does the F-word. An odd combination, perhaps, but one that perfectly explains a Scottish lad who quit school at 16 and came to inhabit the sphere of acting luvvies. His accent tells the same story of merging worlds — a soft Scottish burr, but “a wee bit actorified”, he says himself. “I did go off and make a couple of documentaries,” he continues, fixing me with his blue eyes. “But I didn’t make a movie, and it was great to be at home. We’ve got a new baby, and those are beautiful months that you won’t get back if you’re not there.”

This year, McGregor will break his record with four films due for release (at the mention of this he raises his fist in a triumphant gesture). The first is Haywire, a complex action thriller directed by Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh, in which he plays the owner of a private undercover operations agency opposite Michael Fassbender and Michael Douglas; in the comedy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, he plays a fisheries expert opposite Emily Blunt; Jack the Giant Killer is a big-budget, effects-heavy fairy tale with McGregor as captain of the king’s guard; and in The Impossible, due out at the end of the year, he’s a father who loses his wife and eldest son in the 2004 tsunami in Thailand.

Never could you call him typecast. In fact, rarely is there an actor who has dived, chameleon-like, into such a vast array of roles — he moves from family-friendly popcorn fare to art-house oddities without missing a beat. “Well, I’m lucky,” he says matter-of-factly. “Because I think diversity is what it’s all about.” After Trainspotting came a slew of successful independent films such as Brassed Off, Little Voice and Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book. In 1999, he became a younger Alec Guinness — and an action figure — as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars trilogy. Then the US roles flooded in — Moulin Rouge, Black Hawk Down, The Island, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Angels & Demons, Beginners — and he found himself working with directors such as Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. Then there’s the string of leading ladies, a list that includes Nicole Kidman (whom he affectionately calls “Knickers”), Emily Blunt (“I could make film after film with her”), Renee Zellweger, Naomi Watts, Tilda Swinton, Scarlett Johansson … He won’t name his favourite on the grounds that it “wouldn’t be very gentlemanly, would it?”

Haywire, which sees him clearly relishing playing a villain, is a complicated film that even McGregor admits needs a few viewings to fully unravel. And it’s packed to the rafters with fight scenes. He talks briefly about being a little caught out when a fight scene was added to the film some nine months after the main shoot, when he was anything but fit. Given that he had to go up against martial arts champion Gina Carano, who plays the female lead in the film, this was something of a nerve-racking moment.

“I hadn’t done any training, I hadn’t even been to the gym, suddenly I was in four hours fight rehearsal for two days. I almost couldn’t walk after that. Every muscle in my body hurt. And there I was up against someone who is inordinately fit.” At one point he accidentally punched Carano in the head, causing her to ask him if he’d hurt himself. (He had.)

Filming The Impossible was, if anything, more painful. The tsunami scenes were created with minimal digital effects, meaning McGregor and his co-star Watts had to spend long periods submerged in a gigantic water tank in Spain. He admits he “howled like a baby” when he read the script, which is based on the experiences of a real family. “I was very wary about this film,” says McGregor. “It’s a story about something terrible that happened in recent history, where many, many people lost their lives and the idea of making a movie about it didn’t sit very well on my shoulders.

“But I’ve never really explored being a father in a film before, and I’ve been a father for 15 years, so I agreed to read the script. The story is about a dad who gets split up from his wife and his eldest son, and he has the two youngest sons with him, aged seven and five. And he puts his little boys up on the roof of the hotel while he goes to look for his wife and eldest son. And he can’t stop searching for them. I wouldn’t want to spoil the film, but when they find each other … I was just crying my eyes out. And that’s why I think it’s valid to make the film because it’s all about the human spirit and a unique look at what makes us tick.”

Three years ago, he and his wife of 16 years, Eve Mavrakis (who is French and pronounces her name Ev), moved to Los Angeles with their four children, Clara, 15, Esther, nine, Jamiyan, nine, and the baby whose name has not been made public. (The latter two are adopted.)

“I didn’t have any desire to live in Los Angeles,” he explains, when reminded of a 2001 interview in which he swore he’d never do any such thing. “I moved to London when I was 18 and I just thought this is where I live. But our friends here in LA said you should see this house, so Eve and I saw it and just fell for it.” They bought it in 2005, rented it out and stayed there now and again. “And then every time we came to stay, we liked being here more and more and then we just decided — on a whim, I suppose — to try living here. And we like it very much,” he pauses to reflect. “The truth is I have to go away to work, and Eve finds it easier to be here with the kids when I’m away.”

The couple met on the set of the television series Kavanagh QC in 1995 — she was working as a production designer. After 16 years, he appreciates “that lovely feeling of being with someone for a really long time … you know each other so well and you’re so comfortable in each other’s company. I get asked what’s the secret to a happy marriage a lot, and there’s no answer to it without trivialising it. You can’t just say ‘if you do this or do that, you’ll have a great marriage’ because it doesn’t work like that. There’s no secret other than to be in love with the woman you’re sharing your life with.” The extended absences can be hard, he says, but they’ve learnt to live with them. “It’s just the way it is. It’s how I make my living, and it’s how I support my family. And we just get on with it.” He paints a picture of family life that is anything but showbizzy.

“There’s a very British, disdainful image of Los Angeles, which is straight out of the pages of gossip celebrity magazines,” he says, rather earnestly. “There’s this idea that if you live here, you’re knocking about at parties with the Beckhams all the time, but that bears no relation to my life at all. When you’ve got four children, your world revolves around them and their friends.”

When he’s not running around organising children’s parties, he’s usually in his garage, where he keeps his collection of vintage motorcycles. His love of motorcycling is well known after making the television series Long Way Round and Long Way Down with his friend Charley Boorman, but the extent of his collection is a revelation. “I’ve got some lovely, lovely old motorcycles that date back to 1929. There’s about 15 of them, and I’d be quite happy to just stand and look at them all day,” he says wistfully. “I have a very basic mechanical knowledge, and I like tinkering with them. And then I love to ride them, of course. It’s like meditation for me.”

Ironically, spending too much time in Los Angeles when he’s not working is the time that McGregor finds himself fretting over his career. “I try not to worry about where I am in this business. But it’s easier to worry here than at home because Los Angeles is all about the film business. At home you feel you’re judged on your body of work as a whole, here it’s more about your latest box-office figures. It’s not a very comfortable feeling.”

Raised in Crieff, Perthshire, the son of two teachers, McGregor always wanted to act. His parents let him leave school at 16 to join the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and within a year of leaving he was starring in the Dennis Potter television series Lipstick on Your Collar; within two, Shallow Grave, and shortly after came Trainspotting.

Fame arrived with all its disadvantages. McGregor laughs as he tells the story of when he was strip searched by US customs. “It was after Trainspotting, and the customs guy took me into a booth. It was absolutely that he’d seen me in a movie about heroin and therefore assumed I’d be carrying heroin on me. I sort of took it as a compliment. Obviously I’d been quite convincing.” Returning to Scotland after Trainspotting wasn’t easy either. “I was in Glasgow five or six years later and people were calling out in the street: ‘Renton, f****** Renton’. Everyone wanted to take me for a pint. I found I was doing a lot of very fast walking, head down, because it was very difficult to wander about.” These days he’s more accustomed to being stopped in the street. “I really don’t mind if people come up to me. As long as they’re polite about it, I’m happy. I don’t like people who are pushy and sometimes people will come up and tell me that they didn’t like me in something.

“I want to say ‘Just don’t bother. If you didn’t like me in something keep it to yourself. Don’t come across the street and put yourself out to tell me I was s*** in something. I don’t want to know’. But people love to do that.” Talking of Scotland gets him misty eyed. He talks unemotionally about what he misses of London — the theatre, his house in St John’s Wood which is rented out, chatting with people in Regent’s Park while his “dog sniffs other dogs’ bums”. But Scotland invokes a zeal in his voice that gives away the patently passionate man beneath. “It’s funny but it’s a very Scottish thing to love the place more the less you’re there. It’s easy to love Scotland from afar. But I do yearn for it. I yearn to take a motorcycle ride and lose myself in the Highlands. It’s the one thing I don’t often do.”

Another thing he doesn’t often do, is drink. It’s been 11 years since his last sip of alcohol. “I was a father, a husband, I had a burgeoning career and I was drinking too much. Something had to give and I didn’t want it to be any of the other ones that went. So I stopped drinking. It wasn’t a big deal,” he says, a trace of irritation in his voice. Does he mind talking about it? “No, it’s fine. It’s just that when you boil down my interviews, it’s always that I take my clothes off and I don’t drink.”

This does seem a little unfair. There’s more to McGregor than abstemiousness and a penchant for nakedness. But he does have a reputation for taking his clothes off in films. There are so many that he’s even joked that nudity is written into his contract. “The truth is I don’t mind doing nudity if it’s called for,” he says. “I’ve not done it in some films when asked to, because I felt it was gratuitous, but films reflect our lives. I love romantic films, and part of that in our modern world is sex. I don’t want to be the guy getting out of bed clutching a pillow to his d***, because people don’t do that in real life. If you’ve just spent three hours making love to a woman in bed, you’re not going to be worried about her seeing you when you get up to go to the toilet. At least, I wouldn’t be.” He laughs.

Of course, the nudity has got him into trouble before now. He recalls the time when his parents, who he still visits in Perthshire when he can, decided to go to a screening of The Pillow Book. “It’s an amazing film and I loved doing it. But I remember my parents sending me a fax saying, ‘We’re going to go and see The Pillow Book tonight in Edinburgh, son. We’re going with the farmer and his wife’. They live in the middle of nowhere, next to a farm, and they wanted to take the farmer. And I suddenly thought ‘God, do they have any idea what’s in the film?’” For those who haven’t seen it, McGregor spends much of The Pillow Book completely naked and at one point shares a love scene with a 75-year-old Japanese man. McGregor tried to warn his parents that the film was “quite racy”, but it was no use. They went, and his father faxed his response the next day. It simply read, “I’m glad you inherited one of my major attributes.”

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McGregor’s fondness for motor sports is well documented. A known gearhead, he has twice in the last decade embarked on cross-continental motorcycle trips — one around the northern hemisphere and one down the length of Africa. Both were broadcast as miniseries. On this day, he has his vintage Spanish test bike, another of the shoot’s props, lashed down in the bed of the pickup. He is still grinning when he takes the bike down the ramp, and later when a neighbor leans out a window to complain about its apparent lack of a muffler.

A day earlier, in the Spanish-style back patio of a Santa Monica cafe, no muscle cars or motorcycles or other toys in sight, that McGregor smile, the one he deploys with a glance to the middle distance when he makes sort of Zen pronouncements about his life or career, is on frequent display. Somewhere between content and amused, it is what a screenwriter might call a “knowing smile.”

It’s there when he offers, in his still-detectable Scottish lilt, his take on his family’s move three years ago to Los Angeles: “I always just assumed that I’d live in London forever. But I don’t, and I quite enjoy that.” Or his decision just more than a decade ago to quit drinking: “It was effortless, because it was the only thing I was prepared to give up. I wasn’t prepared to give up my career or my child — I wasn’t about to lose my children…11 years. Easy-peasy.”

Or artifice in film, a favorite topic of disdain: “I hate scripts that read like other movies….That’s why I’ve never really nailed the Hollywood ‘hard man’ role, because I don’t really believe it. I don’t know guys who have great exit lines every time they leave the room.”

And later, in a discussion of his long resume of sex scenes: “I love it when scriptwriters write, ‘They climax together,’ and I go, Oh yeah, really?” McGregor’s is the look of a man at total peace with how much he has figured out. And at 40 — more than half a decade removed from the Star Wars prequels and Moulin Rouge and that moment when there was a chance at all-out global megastardom — McGregor seems to have quite a bit figured out.

Yes, Ewan McGregor, who made his star turn 15 years ago as a nihilist junkie in Trainspotting, who always seemed willing to wear eyeliner and go full frontal, is 40. Though over tea, he doesn’t quite look it. Los Angeles has rendered his complexion a shade tanner than a son of Crieff, Scotland, should be capable of, and he’s dressed young: light-washed Levi’s, black leather Chuck Taylors and a black T-shirt with an elaborate Rorschach screen print. But when conversation turns to getting his teenage daughter to join the family for a shoot in London last summer, he doesn’t just sound middle-aged. He sounds like any other slightly harassed dad in the subdivision.

“We can’t really drag her out of L.A. anymore, not with a team of wild horses,” he says with a laugh.
He’s been married to his wife, Eve, a production designer he met early in his career, for 16 years. The couple have four girls, ranging in age from 1 to 15. Over the years, he’s been largely guarded about his family life, but in conversation, he tends to define himself as much as a father as an actor.

“I’ve tried very hard to keep them out of the way, because it’s nothing to do with anybody, and it’s not fair on them,” he says. “We have a group of friends where some are in the business, some are not in the business — and all walks of the business: a lawyer, a writer, a director we know — and their kids and our kids are all friends. It’s not some kind of showbiz party around our house on the weekends. It’s far from it. It’s like real life.”

At times McGregor’s low-key cool and motorcycles and downright sane approach to the fame-family divide seem of another era. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and Westport come to mind.

Take, for example, an aside he offers about Haywire, which is in theaters Jan. 20 and is the ostensible reason for our sit-down. Helmed by Steven Soderbergh, the international spy thriller stars Gina Carano as an agent on the run, and McGregor as one of several GQ-ready spooks — played by Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum — who either employ or are out to extinguish her. Soderbergh, McGregor explains, put the cast at the preproduction mercy of a former Israeli special agent, who had them all packing fake blue .9 mm pistols to set the level of paranoia just right.

“I didn’t take my gun anywhere….I don’t want to be that guy who’s getting drawn on in the supermarket, when I’ve got my kids around, because I’ve got a rubber gun down the back of my pants,” he says, cracking up. “I kind of chickened out of it….Well, I got the point.”

Getting the point seems to be a McGregor specialty, and why not? He has been working for almost 20 years and has 50-something films to his credit. He is presumably set financially (though he refuses to take the bait when the subject of a back end on Obi-Wan Kenobi action figures is broached: “It wouldn’t be gentlemanly to talk about that”). He’s taken on a variety of work since, including a few that didn’t quite land as intended. If something less than megastardom followed that early-Naughts hot streak, McGregor seems perfectly at ease where he is now. He’s been on a bit of a new streak lately, which started in 2010 with Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer and continued last year with Mike Mills’ terrific Beginners, in which he played an angst-ridden, grief-stricken thirtysomething casting about Los Angeles with Melanie Laurent and a Jack Russell terrier.

He has, in short, achieved the sort of work-life balance that would be maddening to the world at large if he didn’t tend to be such a goddamn nice guy about the whole thing. Unprompted, he twice rearranges the proceedings at the cafe to keep a very pale, very sweaty reporter out of the baking SoCal sun. He pitches the umbrella himself on the second go-round.

“[It’s] almost unnervingly natural, how relaxed he is,” says Carano. A mixed martial artist by training and a total acting novice before Haywire, she has a unique perspective on the matter.

“He’s so smart. Everyone else was so excited, and he’s just relaxed and cool and has all the smart, witty things to say, but he’s kind of quieter,” she says, recalling the cast’s first meeting in a hotel. “And then we all went downstairs and I see this guy take off on his motorcycle — the coolest, most antique motorcycle — and it was Ewan. I was like, ‘That’s Ewan McGregor.’ He’s just way too cool.”

Haywire and Beginners aside, McGregor is moving toward more familiar domestic territory on-screen these days. He’ll play, as he puts it, “a proper dad” in this year’s The Impossible, about a family upended by the tsunami in Thailand in 2004. Despite his being a father for nearly as long as he’s been working, it’s something of a first.

“It’s nice to feel like you’re working on grown-up films and playing a grown-up person,” he says of the development.

In March, he’s especially against type as a buttoned-up Scottish fisheries expert in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Lasse Hallstro?m, the Swedish-born director of Chocolat and The Cider House Rules, who worked with McGregor on Salmon Fishing, cites the actor’s “sense of irony” as one of his greatest strengths. “Privately, he has a wonderful sense of humor,” the director says.

At the cafe, McGregor considers what’s left to accomplish. He says he’d like to direct, unaware of or, more likely, unbothered by the cliche. But acting, he says, is still an end itself.

“If every now and again one’s like a step out, that’s fine,” McGregor says of his role selection these days. “I’d like to feel I’m still climbing the ladder, if you like, but at the same time, it’s not the be-all and end-all. Because I’m really happy where I’m at.”

By now McGregor’s tea bag is on the glass tabletop, and the sun is starting to let up a little bit. It’s the time of day when, one imagines, the dutiful parents of the L.A. metro area line up their cars for the post-school pickup. Or maybe it’s the perfect hour or two to be on a bike, tooling around Southern California. Either way, our allotted time is drawing to a close and McGregor is soon back off to the real world. But not without one last bit of insight.

“Your ambition,” he says with that smile, “can be to carry on doing what you’re doing.”

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In Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, out this month, McGregor portrays a private military contractor of execrable moral fiber who betrays one of his chief assets — a gorgeous assassin played by Gina Carano — triggering an epic confrontation. But while several of the films McGregor has made lately concern skullduggery and calamity, he’s not feeling particularly dour himself. He’s a happy guy, living in L.A. with his family and maintaining a stable of the kinds of classic motorcycles you work on as often as you ride.

Born in Crieff, Scotland, McGregor dropped out of high school at 16 and enrolled at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. After some dues-paying, he broke through in 1996?s Trainspotting; since then he’s convincingly portrayed Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequels, a love-struck poet in Moulin Rouge and the loyal if conflicted son of a man who came out late in life in Beginners — in addition to 40-odd other roles over 20 years.

McGregor has a reputation as a low-maintenance actor, a working man among divas. We talked about Haywire, his taste in motorcycles, his unfortunate inability to fake a punch and how, um, “fate” changed his life.

HEMISPHERES: How is it that you have five movies coming out this year? Have you mastered some sort of cloning technology?
MCGREGOR: It’s just kind of the way it went. They aren’t coming out all at the same time, but there are quite a few of them. I’ve been working a lot and now I’m taking a break.

HEMISPHERES: In Haywire, you play a guy who’s a pretty nasty piece of work.
MCGREGOR: Yeah, we based it on somebody who shall remain nameless.

HEMISPHERES: Give us some hints.
MCGREGOR: You just have to look at the haircut. It’s somebody in the private security business. That’s all I will say.

HEMISPHERES: Wow, now you really sound like a spy. What was it like working with Steven Soderbergh?
MCGREGOR: He’s so relaxed making a film. He’s made so many that he just knows what he’s doing. He sits on the dolly, lights the scene, rehearses the scene, looks into the camera and then shoots the scene. Seven or eight takes would go by without very much direction from him. Then something would happen, the scene would shift somehow, and he’d simply say, “Let’s move on.” It was as if he was waiting for that thing to happen on its own, without forcing it in any way. I’ve wanted to work with him for a long time. We almost did Once Upon a Time together but it didn’t work out. It was lovely that he came back to me with this. I just liked it; I thought it was really an interesting idea — and complicated, like a lot of his work.

HEMISPHERES: Haywire sort of harkens back to the classic spy movies.
MCGREGOR: It reminded me of the Bond films, with the idea of this private soldier/special agent whose boss turns on her. I was trying to play the kind of guy who provides violence for a fee, who puts people in harm’s way and doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as he makes money.

HEMISPHERES: He ends up paying a price, though. Speaking of which: What’s it like to get beaten up by a girl?
MCGREGOR: Gina Carano is unbelievable. I watched her really destroy some stunt guys. Her usual job [as a world-class mixed martial arts fighter] is to hit people, so I think it was hard for her to get used to not actually hitting them. But she ended up doing amazing work. She was very careful with me. There was a sequence of three punches we had to do where I punched with the right and then with the left and then I swept right, directly over her head. She was supposed to duck but didn’t quite, and I hit her right in the head. She grabbed me and said, “Are you OK?” She didn’t feel a thing. I almost broke my finger. How many times do you punch someone in the head and have them ask you if you’re all right?

HEMISPHERES: I’m not answering that. You’ve worked with some great directors, a list that includes Roman Polanski, Baz Luhrmann, Danny Boyle and Woody Allen. Not a bad run you’ve had.
MCGREGOR: Sometimes when you’re on the set you have to pinch yourself. You look across and Woody Allen is sitting there giving you nods. Or, like you said, Polanski. It’s incredible. I love it.

HEMISPHERES: Do they have anything in common, the great ones you’ve worked for?
MCGREGOR: I think they have a vision. A lot of directors for hire can make films for studios, and make films the way other people want them to be made. The great ones can’t do that. They can only make the film that they want to make.

HEMISPHERES: Are you finally taking a break now?
MCGREGOR: I’ve got some publicity to do, but I’m at home with my family. It’s nice. I get a chance to be at home and ride my motorbikes.

HEMISPHERES: Which bike is currently your favorite?
MCGREGOR: Probably the three early-’70s Moto Guzzis are the ones I ride the most. They’re sort of old and industrial. A lot of people don’t like them, but I really do. I have one that looks like it’s just been pulled out of a river — it looks terrible, but actually it can beat most people away from the lights. I love riding old bikes because it’s satisfying keeping them going, and you can be nostalgic about who might have ridden them before you.

HEMISPHERES: Let’s talk a little bit about how you got started as an actor. If your uncle Denis Lawson hadn’t been in the business, you might not have ever left your hometown.
MCGREGOR: My Uncle Denis — I recently worked with him in this film Perfect Sense that’s coming out. It’s the first time I’ve gotten to act with him. I grew up watching him. He’s my real inspiration, and I can absolutely see his acting in mine. Sometimes I’ll call him up and say, “I just saw me doing you in a movie!”

HEMISPHERES: And your parents were fine with your quitting school and following in his footsteps?
MCGREGOR: Yeah, I was 16 when I left, and I was working in the Perth Repertory Theatre a week later. I was one of the stage crew putting up the sets, but they would give me little walk-on parts. I was suddenly working somewhere that embodied all my dreams and all my hopes, working with professional actors and being part of the magic. It was great. It was like coming home for me. I thought it was where I belonged.

HEMISPHERES: Not to be reductionist about it, but you’re especially well known for a couple of things: one, your willingness to disrobe for roles, beginning with Trainspotting, and two, the fact that you don’t drink.
MCGREGOR: I’ve never believed that you need to live a chaotic life in order to be a great actor. I used to live that kind of life, and I was good at my job, but I just sort of scraped by. Now, I feel like I’ve got more control over it, more choice. But you’re right. Most of the stories now boil down to the fact that I don’t drink and the suggestion that I’m naked all the time. I’m the naked sober guy.

HEMISPHERES: I’ve read that you’re willing to watch your films but you hate watching or reading your interviews. Is that true?
MCGREGOR: Yes, I find it really embarrassing. I was walking down the street in London last week and there’s a magazine that the homeless people sell called The Big Issue, and on the front cover it said, “Ewan Tells Us How Fate Changed His Life.” I had forgotten I even did that interview. It’s embarrassing, the idea that I’m on this magazine cover telling the world how fate changed my life. But I love being in the movies, I’ve wanted to be in the movies since I was a kid, and there’s still a part of me that looks up at the big screen and says, “Wow, I’m in that movie — that’s amazing!” I still get a buzz out of it.

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There’s no good reason to dislike Ewan McGregor, so here’s a really petty one: He’s one of those annoyingly unflappable guys who can stuff their life to the brim and carry it off like it’s a fleck of dust on their shoulder. He works constantly. Always has. In the sixteen years since he made his toilet-spelunking splash as a raffish junkie in Trainspotting, McGregor has been in thirty-eight films. He’ll star in three during the first six months of 2012, and there’s a fourth—a 3-D version of The Phantom Menace—that he claims not to have known about. “They’re actually going to rerelease it into the cinema?” he asks. “Well, that’s interesting.”

Add to that work schedule a packed personal life: The 40-year- old Scotsman is the father of four girls, and he seems genuinely taken aback by the suggestion that it could ever get overwhelming. “I never feel battered by it,” he says. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The battering he saves for on-screen. His first film in 2012 is Haywire, an enjoyably scuzzy, cold-blooded action flick directed by Steven Soderbergh. Aside from the fun of “getting my head kicked in,” he took the part for the chance to work with Soderbergh before the director makes good on his recent threats to retire from filmmaking. And if the actor were to follow suit and walk away from movies? “I like the idea of being a sculptor. Just me alone, making something—that solitary existence.” At last, the buried wish for a respite from life’s mayhem! But no: “And then you come out,” he adds, “and you’re back into the house with all the kids. That would be perfect.”

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A few hours pass before McGregor calls me out. “I wanted to ask you something,” he says. “Did you take a picture of my ass crack?” Busted! I feel mortified. He probably thinks I am going to sell it to TMZ. This is bad, real bad. He thinks I am a perv, a creep. “Yes,” I say, blushing. I’m already preparing a lengthy speech that would go on about my morals as they relate to privacy, and that I would never show it to anyone but I probably should not have done it anyways. I can actually delete it right now. Does he want to delete it himself? Would that make him more comfortable? Shit, should I throw the phone in the pool? Instead of reprimanding me as I’d expected, he says, “Can you send me that photo? I want to email it to my publicist as a cover option.” The accompanying photo shoot was never intended to showcase McGregor’s assets—besides, we’ve seen it all before to great effect in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, and Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine. Yet the peculiar exchange serves as an icebreaker, setting into motion the conversations that would reveal the true identity of this fascinating man.

It seems like just yesterday that I was in film school and my screenwriting professor distributed the Trainspotting script. He claimed that there were some movies, grand and full of spectacle, that feel like “the cinematography was done by God,” yet they don’t come close to exploring the real human condition. And then every once in a while there comes a film that, without such extravaganza, tells a story so honest and original, so affecting and resonating, that it reminds us about the true priorities of filmmaking. I knew exactly what he meant.

These humbly budgeted yet brilliantly written and acted films have the rare formula of bringing together organic aspects of filmmaking. And a desirable ingredient in this mix has always been Ewan McGregor. Beginners, a profoundly moving story inspired by the experiences of its director Mike Mills, is the most recent example. “I have a feeling about this film,” he says. “The subject matter makes you think and it gets in touch with your emotions, for sure. But also, just the way it looks and sounds and flows, there’s something very moving about it.”

Exploring a unique father-son relationship, the story follows McGregor’s character Oliver as he copes with his father coming to terms with his homosexuality following his wife’s death. Diagnosed with cancer at the age of 75, Oliver’s father has four years to enjoy this newfound sexual freedom. As Oliver watches his father rediscover life through the process of dying, a quirky French actress, played by Mélanie Laurent, helps him endure the cards he’s been dealt. The freedom to improvise and experiment with emotions in this year’s word-of-mouth champion allow McGregor to flaunt what comes naturally: innate, raw talent.

The iconic Joseph Campbell book, Hero with a Thousand Faces, which comes up during a brainstorming session between BULLETT and McGregor, inspires the visual direction of the accompanying photo. In his deeply philosophical masterpiece, Campbell deconstructs the journey of mankind through religion and mythology. George Lucas’ Star Wars (McGregor portrayed Obi-Wan Kenobi in the franchise’s revamp), is one of the many films that were profoundly influenced by Campbell’s ideals.

Campbell’s terrifyingly exhilarating theory is that every hero gets one “call to adventure,” a turning point in life that comes in many manifestations and serves as a formal invitation to fulfill one’s potential. Defined by its risks, the journey that follows is meant to initiate the most significant self-transformation in a hero’s life. To do this, our hero must leave home and take a journey into the unknown. Should one deny their call to adventure and remain still, Campbell claims, then they will be cursed for the rest of their existence with leading the opposite of what their life was meant to become—a mundane, nine-to-five existence.

The idea fit McGregor like a glove: the man doesn’t just walk on the path to his adventure—he runs through it like a crazed bull with a red cloth attached to his horns. His call to adventure came in the form of a passion and talent from within, so grand that it was impossible to contain. He started to take on one courageous role after another. The risks that any actor would take only once or twice in their career became a constant trademark for McGregor. He has immersed himself in characters as disparate as they are detailed. Gay, straight, drug addict, rock star, villain, leading man—musical, drama, comedy, thriller—he has done it all and more. “Heroes come in all shapes and forms, and no matter what your calling is, pursue it,” he says. That was the message. As we interpreted our own version of Campbell’s theory, the characters that McGregor suggested we explore were, in a way, alter egos that represent the other directions his journey could have gone in a strange parallel realm.

McGregor’s path has been neither straight nor narrow. When he first told his parents he wanted to act, they were concerned, especially his father, a P.E. teacher who was blessed with two sons: an athletic superstar and a drama kid. Recalling Tim Burton’s Big Fish and Mike Mills’ Beginners, two films that McGregor starred in, which explore in-depth father- son relationships, I was curious to know why he’s been drawn to the subject. He recalled his father’s fears of him not being able to support himself while running after his highly improbable dreams. “I tried,” he says. “I wasn’t very sporty, but my older brother, he was good at cricket and rugby. So he was more like my father, I suppose. And then he got accepted into the Royal Air Force and became a pilot, which is something that I think my father would’ve liked to do himself. So my brother was much more like my father. And he understood me less, because I was interested more in music.” After his first job, McGregor called his father and told him he booked the part (Lipstick on Your Collar) and would get paid £24,000. “There was a real moment of relief in his voice. I mean, he was always very supportive, but I think he was probably a bit worried that it wouldn’t work. And once he sensed that it would, he has since been great.”

In addition to his career, McGregor also assumes multiple roles in his everyday hurdles: doting father, loving husband, generous friend, notorious prankster, adventurous free spirit. Assuming the latter, he recently went on a journey of self exploration through Campbell’s highest recommended reboot recipe: wandering, the ancient method of simply going far, far away for a long, long time. The story comes up when I ask him whether he’s ever been to a fortuneteller. About seven years ago, McGregor and a friend took a three-month trip, traveling the world on their motorcycles. He regards the journey as an ultimate life-changing experience.

While staying in Prague, he encountered a psychic who told him he would fall in love during this trip. Happily married, McGregor briefly worried trouble was ahead. “I thought, shit… You know, I’m married. I’ve got two kids at home. The last thing I need to do is to fall in love with a girl. I took it with a pinch of salt. And then, on that trip, I met my daughter, Jamiyan, who we adopted from Mongolia. So the fortuneteller was right. But you know, it wasn’t the kind of girl that I’d been thinking about at the time.” Like heroes, love too comes in many shapes and forms.

With the expertise of a pro gambler, McGregor always puts his heart and soul into projects that don’t necessarily bring a fortune but surely produce acclaim. He has no boundaries, complaints, or excuses when it comes to his job. Whether the role demands him to pull down his pants and shake his penis, dive into a nasty toilet in search of a heroin baggie, or makeout with Jim Carrey, McGregor conquers each task gracefully.

While discussing the unexpected turns his career has taken, McGregor reveals that his astonishing portrayal of Curt Wild in Velvet Goldmine was an intimidating challenge as the character is based on a combination of two megastars: Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. I ask him if he tried the “method acting” thing, which unexpectedly brings up an epic memory. It will teach you to never drink and method act.

When Velvet Goldmine was in production, David Bowie—whom Jonathan Rhys Meyer’s character was based on—did not want anything to do with the film. Iggy Pop, however, was supportive of the production. “Iggy Pop was very happy for us to use his music. I got to sing a couple of numbers. David Bowie didn’t want us to touch it at all because he felt that he didn’t want the insinuation that he might have been having sex with men.” A while after the film came out, McGregor was invited to a Versace event where Iggy Pop was set to play. He went with the hope of meeting the musician. When he got there, however, he realized he’d downed a bit too much of the sweet nectar. As Iggy started to play, he made his way to the front row. “I’d spent a long time with a choreographer working on his movements and studying his concerts and feeling like I had Iggy Pop in my bones while filming those scenes. So when I was watching him, I felt like some kind of kindred spirit between us, you know?”

After the show, McGregor went to his dressing room to bond with the musician, where it quickly became clear Iggy Pop had never seen the film nor had he any idea who McGregor was. “So this spirit that I felt we shared was shattered, and in my drunken state I went… I did him to him, you know?” He found himself dancing in Iggy Pop’s dressing room—as Iggy Pop. “The alcoholic fog sort of cleared and I could see myself doing it, and I went, What the fuck am I doing? And Iggy Pop was sitting there going, ‘Yeah, that’s cool, man.’ I didn’t know what to do. It was so embarrassing. I think I just shuffled out of the dressing room and got the fuck out of there as quickly as possible.”

Back at the shoot, the photographer calls out expressions to McGregor. “Funny, sad, pissed off, timid.” His face transforms through the roller coaster of emotions effortlessly. “Excited, disappointed… sexy?” He valiantly attempts a model pout, and then bursts into laughter, embarrassed, as if being sexy is the one thing he cannot fake—it just comes naturally. Someone throws “Christopher Walken” into the list of emotions. McGregor starts to speak like him. An Al Green song begins to play. He sings along in a lovely voice as his congenial companion, a rescue dog, Syd enters the frame again, his curly hair covered in lipstick from the adoring fans on set.

McGregor sits on a vintage suitcase for a picture. It makes a cracking sound and shakes. I gasp, but he doesn’t fall. Instead he gets up and apologizes for ruining the already decayed prop. So genuine and humble, it does not even occur to him that he is a star, and that obviously, we are concerned for his safety. When it comes to McGregor, there is no hint of entitlement or inflated sense of his own importance, unlike many of those who live in the public eye. He has figured out some kind of a secret formula for attaining the best of both worlds: pursuing his passion without sacrificing his authenticity.

McGregor has undoubtedly stamped his presence on some of the most iconic films of our time. His intrepid career promises to secure itself among the best while his courageous choices will forever be renowned for their quality. McGregor is a director’s wet dream—immensely talented yet without vanity. Having assumed numerous real life personas, he has mastered the craft. He can—and pretty much has—played everyone and everything.

But who would play him? What if the tables were turned and someone made a film about him, and he found himself in Iggy’s shoes? What genre would his life be and who would he want to play himself? “Cate Blanchett,” he says. “She could play me. That would be good, wouldn’t it?” He goes on to explain how such a film would be quite dull. “It’d be like a long, slow, indulgent French film about mood.” Surely enough, his humble response fails to calculate the vast interest an Ewan McGregor biopic featuring an androgynous Cate Blanchett spazzing out like McGregor spazzing out like Iggy Pop would generate.

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“I’m not remotely worried,” he says. “For all of the hurtling towards climate change, there’s also a lot more understanding of it than there was when we were kids. They don’t call environmentalists tree huggers any more, so there’s hope!”

Doomsday would be an odd fixation for McGregor. After all, life is rather good. He has five movies coming down the pipe, and promising ones, too. There’s Bryan Singer’s sword-swinging fantasy Jack the Giant Killer and The Impossible, in which he and Naomi Watts face the 2004 tsunami. He also plays a stuffy scientist who falls for Emily Blunt in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and he’s part of an all-star ensemble in Steven Soderbergh’s action thriller Haywire.

But the first and most original film of this batch is Perfect Sense, a small Scottish indie about, among other things, the end of the world. It’s a trending topic this year – the end has seldom been so nigh. At the multiplex, humanity has been under more or less constant threat since January: from aliens (Battle Los Angeles), apes (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), asteroids (Melancholia) and now disease (Contagion). In Perfect Sense, McGregor plays a Glaswegian chef who falls in love with an epidemiologist (Eva Green) while they – and the rest of the human race – lose their senses one by one. First to go is smell, then taste, then hearing, with each loss preceded by a spell of extreme derangement: crippling grief, rabid hunger or violent rage. No explanation is given, no exception is made, and it’s not clear that anyone can stop it. It is quietly petrifying.

“We get so many reactions to this film,” says McGregor. “Someone I know saw it in London recently and was fine until half an hour later, when she got the tube home. Then she just broke down crying. But I didn’t see it as the end of the world at all. When I read the script, I felt it was a really nicely written love story and the backdrop was a metaphor for falling in love. You know how we say that you lose your senses when you fall in love?”

MCGregor’s own disposition is as sunny as the Los Angeles skies. He looks tanned and boyish in a faded T-shirt and jeans; his bicycle helmet is on the chair beside him (he lives just a couple of minutes away). He’s never been overly discouraged by the traditional portents of disaster, like climate change, bird flu and the return of Jersey Shore.

“Ha ha! Yes, I’m hopeful, always have been. I’ve never had that fear of: ‘Oh my God, how can you bring kids into this world?’ I’m a much more positive person than that. I wouldn’t have wanted my parents not to have me because they thought like that, would I? Because, look – I’m having a great time!”

This much is certainly true. Over a 20-year career spanning 46 movies, he has wielded a light sabre, shot heroin, fought wars and slept with countless beautiful women, and a few men, too. Life looked peachy at the turn of the millennium with the first Star Wars movie under his belt – followed by the huge success of Moulin Rouge. He went off around the world on a motorbike with his friend Charley Boorman in the Long Way Round.

But when he returned, things took a bit of a dive. Star Wars didn’t launch him into a spangly new category of stardom. There followed a string of movies that underwhelmed critics and the box office – Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker, Miss Potter and Scenes of a Sexual Nature. Even when he worked with Woody Allen in Cassandra’s Dream, the film was universally panned.

This year might be seen as a renaissance: since last year’s The Ghost Writer – the Robert Harris-scripted thriller directed by Roman Polanski – it seems that McGregor’s graph has begun to swing upwards once more. “But I would never draw a graph of my career,” points out McGregor. “I don’t look at things that way. On the vertical axis you could have box office, or personal satisfaction, and whenever you start thinking about that you never feel on top. There were films that were never seen by anyone but they were still important. Everything is a stepping stone. I’m sure my agents would be able to tell you exactly where I am on that graph, but I’m not sure that I want to know, really! The main thing is what’s next – the future.”

He seems propelled by a simple sense of adventure. “I turned 40 in March,” he says. “But I don’t feel it – you never do. I still want to kick around on BMX bikes! I have to ask my wife: ‘Do I look like a cock, or is this all right, the way I’m dressed?’ Because you don’t want to be ‘that guy’, but you also don’t want to listen to that voice either. I want to wear skinny jeans when I’m in my 70s. Why not? Who cares?”

According to David Mackenzie, the director of Perfect Sense, McGregor is “a delight”, but there’s “a complexity to him that isn’t just all sunny and eager. He’s more than just an all-round jack-the-lad good egg. He has his dark side.”

Mackenzie would know. They first worked together on Young Adam in 2003, a tightly wrought noir about a cold-hearted drifter who engages in a series of loveless sexual encounters with Tilda Swinton and Emily Mortimer. McGregor recalls the experience with a chuckle. “David’s the classic tortured artist on set,” he says. “Tearing his hair out, you know, full of angst. And he does have a taste for darkness. We had some odd conversations about what to do in each sex scene, to come up with ideas that were sexual but cold. Like: ‘Maybe she should just jerk him off in the sink?’ That’s not the kind of conversation you have with most directors!”

Mackenzie remembers that McGregor set about this rather difficult material in a typically unfussy manner. “Some actors are very demanding of your energy, but Ewan has a straightforward practicality that I find very refreshing,” he says. “You know: ‘Let’s not make this overcomplicated; let’s just get on with it and do some good work.’ If I want to do a scene in a film which is relatively honest – say the couple has just had sex, so they’re going to be naked – he’s always quite comfortable with it. To the point of being actually evangelical for nude scenes!”

There was a full-frontal scene in Young Adam that was cut from that film until McGregor lobbied to have it reinstated. In Perfect Sense, we see him naked again: I wonder if nudity is practically a tradition for McGregor by now. After Young Adam, Velvet Goldmine, Trainspotting and The Pillow Book in 1996 – where he was naked for most of the movie – his old chap has quite the sizzle reel.

“Oh yeah, my cock’s got a great career,” he laughs. “It’s got its own Facebook page and Twitter account and everything.” He recalls the time he starred in What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton in a tweedy theatre in Salisbury. “I had to stand up naked from behind a sofa and grab a policeman’s helmet to cover myself and dash across the stage,” he says. “One day I let the helmet go, just for effect, and there was this gasp – it was a matinée and the whole blue-rinse brigade was there. I loved it! I felt very powerful in that moment. So I kept doing it. But one day someone spilt water on the stage and I slipped and landed on my back. I was sliding with my legs up, arse first into the front row!”

One of the HIGHLIGHTS of shooting Perfect Sense – alongside licking shaving cream (actually white chocolate) off Eva Green in a bath – was acting for the first time alongside his uncle, Denis Lawson, the man who had inspired him to take up the profession in the first place. Lawson came from the same small Scottish town of Crieff (population 6,579) where McGregor grew up. McGregor’s father was a gym teacher and his mum worked with special needs children – there were no artists in his family besides Uncle Denis.

“If you took my uncle out of the equation,” he says, “I don’t know if I’d have even thought to become an actor. I’d have been a…” – he shrugs and looks around as a sous chef emerges from the kitchens in a tall white hat – “a baker or something.

“I just wanted to be him when I was growing up,” he says. “He’d arrive up in Crieff from London, where he’d already moved, and he’d come back in the 70s, you know, with feathers in his hair, sheepskin waistcoat, no shoes and beads and stuff. I’d be like: ‘I want to be that guy.’ And the fact that he came from the same small town made it look possible.”

His parents let him leave school at 16 to follow his dream. He joined the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and found success so quickly that he dropped out before graduating to star in the acclaimed Dennis Potter TV series Lipstick on Your Collar. A year later came Shallow Grave, then a spell on Kavanagh QC, where he met his wife Eve, a production designer. And no sooner were they married in 1995 than Trainspotting made McGregor a household name, at least in the UK. Once he landed the role of Obi Wan Kenobi in 1999, he became a household name pretty much everywhere else.

It was around this time that McGregor gave up drinking. But not in the traditional manner of meetings and sponsors and 12 steps. Instead McGregor just quietly quit and has never looked back. “I just couldn’t fit it in,” he says. “I had a family and a career, and there just wasn’t the time to drink as well. It’s not that big a deal. In England we think it’s funny that we drink a lot. It’s a badge of honour, and I think that’s pathetic, really.”

He became increasingly prolific in his work. McGregor has always made film after film, back to back – he’s the actor who likes to say yes. There was a time when he considered working less, perhaps taking a leaf out of Daniel Day-Lewis’s book, for example. It didn’t last. “I think it’d be quite cool to do what he does, and make just one amazing film every five years,” he says. “But I just couldn’t do it; there’s no way. I like to work too much. And I’ve got a family to support. When you make smaller films, you don’t make the kind of money where you can take years off.”

Lewis was one of McGregor’s early idols. His own style, however, is very different – he doesn’t practise method acting and argues that it’s largely misinterpreted by inexperienced, insecure actors. “Obviously Daniel doesn’t do it like this, but a lot of actors do it because there’s a safety in it: ‘If I do all this, I’ll be OK.’ But it can very often be a guise for just being horrible to everybody!

“I find that the acting’s getting easier – with experience, everything is more instinctual. The hardest part is the hanging about in between. The boring parts become more boring: ‘How can I spend the next two hours in this caravan?’ For the first 15 years I ran around wasting all my energy, but now I try and use my time constructively. Oh you should see my needlepoint – it’s amazing.”

He’d like to direct, though he doesn’t take the transition lightly. “It’s quite scary,” he says. “There’s lots of voices on your shoulder saying: ‘It’ll be shit’, ‘What makes you think you can tell a story?’ You know, the negative voices. Much more so than in acting.” And he wouldn’t mind doing another epic motorbike journey either, but on his own this time. “It’s a purer way to do it. Because, you know, Charley might want to go on ahead, while I might want to bimble around. So I might ship a bike to Patagonia or Peru and just ride around there for six weeks.

“I do still have the bug, but I just can’t justify taking off from my family, really,” he continues, “particularly when I’ve been away so much this past year already [he spent five months in Thailand shooting The Impossible, then six in England for Jack the Giant Killer].” So for now he’s staying home in Los Angeles. He doesn’t live in some gated celebrity enclave up on Mulholland Drive, but on a normal street, rich but not starry. He bought the place many years ago, thinking it would be nice to have a place to stay if he ever had to make a film there. “But no one shoots in Los Angeles any more,” he says. So he rented the house out until three years ago, when he and Eve decided to try living there just for the hell of it.

“I thought I would live in London for ever,” he says. “So there’s a lot of novelty to living out here. But I love it. It’s always a nice day to ride your motorbike. And I’m not often recognised here. Well, I wear my balaclava, obviously.”

And for a change he’s actually got some time on his hands. “I’m not going to work till next year, I’ve promised myself,” he says. That means he’s free to tinker about with his collection of old VWs and motorbikes – one of his favourite hobbies. Speaking of which, he needs to be going – “My Italian motorbike guy is going to come by,” he says. And with that he grabs his helmet, unlocks his bike outside and slips down a sun-dappled side street, a man content, with the sun on his back, pressing eagerly forwards.

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