Please Rewind Talent Wall

Ewan McGregor

Ewan McGregor has built a career on an appealing kind of restlessness. Born in Perth, Scotland, on 31 March 1971 and raised in nearby Crieff, he left school at 16, worked as a stagehand at Perth Theatre and studied drama before moving to London to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His screen career began before graduation with a leading role in Dennis Potter’s Channel 4 series Lipstick on Your Collar. After making his film debut in Bill Forsyth’s Being Human, McGregor began his collaboration with director Danny Boyle in Shallow Grave. Their next film, Trainspotting, gave him his international breakthrough as Mark Renton, a role he would revisit more than two decades later in T2 Trainspotting. McGregor’s filmography is marked by sharp changes of tone. He played rock star Curt Wild in Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, the romantic poet Christian in Moulin Rouge! and the younger Edward Bloom in Tim Burton’s Big Fish. He also entered one of cinema’s biggest fictional worlds as the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, later returning to the role for the 2022 Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi. Alongside those large-scale productions, he has taken on thrillers, dramas, musicals, comedy and voice work. His credits include Black Hawk Down, Young Adam, The Ghost Writer, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, The Impossible, Christopher Robin, Doctor Sleep and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. On television, his dual performance as Emmit and Ray Stussy in Fargo earned him a Golden Globe, while Halston placed him at the centre of another character-driven miniseries. Theatre has remained an important part of his work, from Guys and Dolls and Othello in London to his Broadway debut in The Real Thing. He expanded into filmmaking with American Pastoral, his 2016 directorial debut, in which he also starred. Across film, television and the stage, McGregor’s career has been defined less by one fixed persona than by a willingness to keep shifting shape.