Ewan McGregor is in a new movie "Beginners." Here he is seen at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. (John McCoy/LA Daily News)
Ewan McGregor says he didn't really understand the famous line "never work with children or animals" until he made "Beginners."
In the sweet romantic dramedy, the Scottish actor plays Oliver, a thirtysomething graphic artist who has never married, having seen a passionless marriage between his parents. The film from Mike Mills ("Thumbsucker") shifts mostly between two stories.
One involves Oliver and his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), 75, who announces to the world after his wife passes away that he is gay and proceeds to do all the things he had never dared before. The second, which takes place after Hal's death, is about Oliver's budding romance with Anna (M lanie Laurent of "Inglourious Basterds"), an actress who has never settled down.
One constant in the stories is the very cute Arthur (real name Cosmo), a Jack Russell terrier that Oliver inherits from his father.
It is in Arthur that Oliver confides his feelings about his relationship with Anna. Arthur's responses are in subtitles like "While I understand up to 150 words, I don't talk."
McGregor was so smitten with Cosmo that he found himself looking forward to going to work every day so he could hang around with the dog. The 40-year-old actor says he used to think that the adage "never work with children or
animals" was because they were difficult to work with."In my naivete I never realized that it was because people only watched them," he says. "But I'm very happy to share the attention with Cosmo because he's worth it."
Though he had grown up with dogs, McGregor said he never realized until his wife visited him on the set and saw how much he enjoyed spending time with Cosmo that there was "a gap in my life and that I really missed having a dog."
One of the reasons he had never gotten one as an adult was because his wife, Eve Mavrakis, was allergic to dogs. So he began looking for one that was hypoallergenic. But when he contacted a breeder, "she sounded completely bananas and I had the feeling that her dogs would be, too."
Finally, on the second to last day of the "Beginners" shoot, the actor Googled rescue dogs and saw a picture of Sid, who like Cosmo is small and white, and McGregor snatched him up.
"He is a white poodle mix with some apricot coloring and he's got orange-yellow eyes - wolf eyes. He's really odd but is a fantastic little dog," says McGregor about Sid.
But McGregor wasn't only attracted to "Beginners" because of the dog.
The story is inspired by Mills' own experience with his father, who came out of the closet at 75 and enthusiastically embraced his new identity until he passed away five years later. The change also affected the director's own life. When he wrote to McGregor about the role, he said he felt that life was passing him by and "All that I wanted and hadn't tasted became crucial. For me that was to find the right someone and to finally stay with someone."
This kind of unabashed romanticism appealed to the actor. Although he has been married for 16 years, "I still feel we are beginners."
"In my work I've always really liked romantic stories," says McGregor, who came to prominence playing a junkie in Danny Boyle's 1996 film "Trainspotting." "Since I was a kid I probably enjoyed romantic films more than any other. I'd watch old black-and-white Hollywood movies from the '30s and '40s and like `Casablanca' and `It Happened One Night' - unbelievably romantic."
Today's romantic comedies, he believes, shroud those feelings in laughs. "I've never been that interested in that. I find it more interesting to make a film about romance and unashamedly about the idea of love. It's something that I've done a lot in my career," he says, pointing to films like "Moulin Rouge" and "Young Adam."
While making "Beginners," McGregor had to relate to his two human co-stars as well as Cosmo. Mills gave him some interesting assignments to do so, including going out with Plummer and buying a scarf for the now 81-year-old actor. He didn't succeed because Plummer became obsessed with the black skinny jeans McGregor was wearing that day.
"I kept trying to wrangle him away from the jeans counter to buy him a scarf and then ended up putting $1,000 worth of jeans on my credit card because he didn't have one with him, which I got the production to pay me back for," says McGregor, who looks dapper this day in a light gray suit and with his hair spiked.
"I think Mike put us together because he spent time trying to find the right match," says McGregor about the casting. Plummer, he says, gives "a blistering performance" as Hal.
"I have a photograph of my office on his last day on the set with our arms around each other's shoulders, which I really like," says McGregor, who now calls Los Angeles home. "It's like my screen dad. I'm very fond of him."
For Laurent, Mills first had the two sit down and do breakup scenes, with each of them taking turns giving the bad news.
"It was a terrible exercise to do because it's so awkwardly horrible to imagine doing that for real," McGregor says. "And to do it over and over again with somebody you don't know overloads the senses. But it was very clever and effective. By the time we finished, some barrier had gone."
Mills also had the pair ride roller coasters one afternoon at Magic Mountain.
"I think he thought it would be another icebreaker to see each other frightened and would also be a nice metaphor for falling in love - that you're not in control of it, that it's exhilarating, frightening and a bit queasy."
McGregor has been a busy man recently, working constantly since shooting Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer." After "Beginners," McGregor has five more films coming out, including the one he's shooting now in London - Bryan Singer's modern-day fairy tale "Jack the Giant Killer."
All of them look intriguing. There is Steven Soderbergh's thriller "Haywire"; Lasse Hallstr m's whimsical "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen"; "The Impossible" with Naomi Watts, about a family caught in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; and "Perfect Sense," about two people who fall in love during an epidemic.
Though he's worked a lot since, McGregor has a love for "Beginners" and an admiration for Mills: "There's something about him that if I'd be able to work with him the rest of my life, that would be fine."
Recently, the actor saw the film for a second time and had a realization about himself.
"I was watching myself with Cosmo and I thought that's kind of what I look like now. Every morning and every night it's me out with a little white dog on a leash mucking around in the park."
Source: http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_18200989?source=rss
Rachel Blanchard Vanessa Marcil Kim Yoon jin Brittny Gastineau Piper Perabo
No comments:
Post a Comment