Perfect Sense (2011)
Haywire (2011)
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011)
The Impossible (2011)
Jack the Giant Killer (2013)
The Scottish actor has never been afraid to take chances, drop his trousers, or kiss a boy. Now he comes clean.
Sydney, Ewan McGregor’s sand-colored poodle mutt, is pooping on a well-kempt lawn in Los Angeles. He eyes the horizon, birds chirp, and McGregor readies the bag. Suddenly, a black Kerry terrier appears, held by a peroxide septuagenarian wearing a too-loose vintage Brentwood marathon T-shirt and too-tight spandex shorts. Sydney, torn by two competing passions, seems unable to decide whether to lunge immediately or finish his business. His eyes dart back and forth. Then, in a beige flash, Sydney makes up his mind, leaving the poop half in and half out. Moments later, sheepishly, tenderly, McGregor tidies Sydney up with a napkin cadged from Le Pain Quotidien. “Ah,” he murmurs quietly, “my wee man, Syd.” The tone of the day is set.
An hour later, the three of us are sitting on a picnic bench atop Inspiration Point at the summit of Will Rogers Park in Pacific Palisades. Well, two of us are sitting. McGregor’s lying on the bench, face up, bum westerly, legs spread in the air, illustrating an early professional mishap of onstage nudity. The incident in question involved one inopportunely placed vase full of water, two spills (the vase’s and, shortly thereafter, his), a racy Joe Orton farce, and a front row of British pensioners, alarmed and titillated by the fast-approaching naked rear end of the then 21-year-old Scot. “So I’m sliding toward the front row of the audience like this,” he says, “butt naked, and thinking, What of the front row? They just got my bumhole coming straight at them.” For those unlucky enough not to have been there, McGregor hasn’t been shy since.