Ewan McGregor is a phenomenal actor who continues to do an amazing job in Hollywood!
In his most recent movie, “Beginners” dropping today, Ewan plays a character named Oliver, a young man trying to find his way in life.
After his mother’s death, Oliver is rocked by two annoucements. He learns that his 75-year-old father has terminal cancer and that he has a young male lover, meaning his father was secretly gay the entire time he was married.
The cast of “Beginners” also includes Christopher Plummer and Melanie Laurent.
Ewan is a very open-minded man and this is not the first gay-friendly movie he’s been featured in. Ewan feels it’s acceptable to desire who you want, whether man or woman and it doesn’t and shouldn’t interfere with anyone else’s life!
Here check out GlobalGrind’s exclusive interview with Ewan below.
GG: The dialogue of this movie was great, amazing writing. How important is the script for you when you choose a film?
Ewan McGregor: Everything, it’s everything. More than the writing, it’s the story that’s in the writing that’s most important to me, because I think that you have to have that desire to know what happens next and that feeling where the words become a movie in your mind, pictures in your head. That is, I guess, what good writing is.
Why do you think that this story was important to tell?
I think it’s nice to be involved. I don’t know why it’s important for it to be told now for instance, as opposed to any other time, but I think it’s a true story. I mean, it’s based on our writer/director Mike Mills’ true experience with his father. His father did come out of the closet when he was 75, shortly after his mother had passed away and started embracing his life as a homosexual man to the fullest. He had relationships, joined gay book clubs and film clubs and Mike was there around with him at that time and there to help him when he was diagnosed with cancer and started to become ill.
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The character Hal had to hide his sexuality. What do you think it will take for America to start accepting more male homosexuals, as opposed to female homosexuals?
Well, I think there’s probably a stigma against both. I don’t know, but I think it’s getting better. We’re accepting and hopefully we’ll become more accepting to the point where it’s not even an issue anymore. It’s just the way it should be. I mean, we were just talking about people’s romantic desires and whether people desire another man or a woman, it doesn’t really interfere with anybody else’s life, so why society has such a big problem with it, I don’t know.
A lot of gay men hide their sexuality from people and from their wives like in this situation. Why do you think that’s the case?
Mike, in this film “Beginners,” does tend to look back at the life of his father. Historically it looks at what life might have been like for his father as a young man and in the earlier ’50s in the United States of America and explores some of the pressures that might have led his father into the decision to hide his sexuality and to live a, what might have been considered at the time, more normal life. He does have a great tenderness, I think Mike, in trying to understand his father’s decisions to hide it all those years.
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How was it working with Melanie?
Fantastic. She’s a real life force, Mélanie Laurent, and she comes as a writer and a director. This year, she directed her own movie and recorded her own album. She’s great talent. She brings a really, the characters that we play, Oliver I played and Anna who Melanie played, are both falling in love with each other, but in a messy sort of fashion. They both come with a lot of baggage.
