| Ewan McGregor Articles & Interviews Details May 2003 |
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| GOD BLESS DIXIE AND ROBER E. LEE’S HOLY GHOST—DOWNTOWN WETUMPKA, ALABAMA, looks like a dream. What the blood, sweat, and bullwhipped flesh of slaves built in the early 1800s has been lifted, tucked, and given a shimmering coat of Capra-esque varnish. Plantation owners in seersucker suits used to mosey up the Coosa River and through the julep-sloshing rapids of Moccasin Gap, finally tying their paddleboats to the Bibb Graves Bridge in the middle of town. Wetumpka’s natural resources—the apple blossoms exploding like bottle rockets, the frolicking deer, doves, and turkeys—inspired wealthy philanthropists like the Tulanes to winter here. Hell, they’re still here, rotting away in the family vault. These days, though, the southern dandies have been replaced by a different type of intruder: unnaturally tan men who wear makeup and don’t eat meat; women with breasts that poke instead of sway; al of them spouting gibberish like Pilates, edamame, and soy gluten. California weirdos. Freaks. Behind the counter at Café Louisa, a java joint between Montgomery and Wetumpka, Jeremy Adams has a straight-on view of the Big Fish production office. Tim Burton wanders in and out, hair going in every direction like schizophrenic tree branches. Albert Finney stands outside glaring at the sky. After watching two other film crews come and go, Adams barely looks u anymore. This latest invasion is just another fresh coat of paint on the Witern Theater, some cash in the county kitty, and a chance for Rose to hawk new T-shirts at her discount shop. (This time they read I WAS THERE WHEN THEY FILMED BIG FISH.) But even the smoothest coffee grinder isn’t above losing his frothy layer of cappuccino cool when wormy Everyman Steve Buscemi strolls into the store. He walked in,” Adams recalls, “and before I even said, ‘Hi’ or ‘Welcome’ or anything, I just yelled, ‘Shut the fuck up, Donnie. You’re outta your element.’” The cussing, screaming Big Lebowski-quoting—and obviously insane—barista sent Buscemi fleeing from the store. And there was the day Ewan McGregor, Big Fish’s biggest star, ducked in for a breakfast of pitch-black coffee. “Mr. McGregor?” Adams says, scratching nervously at his rusty-Brillo-pad scalp. “Well, when I saw him—I couldn’t help it—but I just thought about losing my virginity. Here he is, this cool guy, big movie star—and I could think about was having sex on an American flag while watching Trainspotting.” God bless America. God bless Ewan McGregor. Y’ALL LIKE MEAT? Pardon me? Y’all like meat? Life below the Mason-Dixon line is a deep-fried tangle of misconceptions and stereotypes. For every closeted Klansman, there’s a homogenized city stretching out its accepting arms to every race and creed; for every moon-shining hick with a whiskey still and a Camaro on cinder blocks, there’s a thousand soccer moms and BMW dads tooling through the suburbs; for every Moon Pie and boiled peanut, there’s a country-club buffet of madarin duck and London broil. But one stereotype that can’t be denied is the fine art of southern hospitality. The engine of the McGregor’s moving van was still warm when the pies began raining down. Apple. Blueberry. Key lime. Banana cream. Coconut cream. Even peach cobbler. “It’s just so neighborly, isn’t it?” McGregor says, fiddling with a boddle of Sam’s Club water. “It’s a very southern thing, you know, the whole idea of the fruit pie. That’s what you do when someone new movies in, apparently—you bring them a pie.” And then came the deluge of meat. “This wonderful womans calls us up and says, ‘Y’all like meat?’” McGregor recalls, Vaseline-ing his vowels into an over-the-top drawl. “Next thing we knew she was at our door with this huge oven dish, full of a side of beef with gravy and vegetables, and we stuck it in the oven and had it for dinner. It was fantastic.” Four months on location is long, even by Hollywood standards, so when McGregor landed the lead in Tim Burton’s Big Fish (based on the Daniel Wallace novel), he airlifted his family from their London theater-district home to the pine-tree and picket-fence utopia between Wetumpka and Montgomery. McGregor has made a habit of temporarily uprooting his wife, Eve, and daughters, Clara Mathilde and Esther Rose, and planting them wherever he’s filming. New homes, new schools, new dialects. But nothing, not the burnt sierra of Spain, the spicy tang of Morocco, the isolation of Australia, could prepare the McGregors for the sheer down-home tenderness of Alabama. As a 32-year-old father of two, McGregor readily admits to being a bit of an old fogy; his days in Alabama usually beginning with a morning walk to Clara’s school and end with a good book. He’s long since cut back on the pub-crawling, has reached a truce (at least in theory) with Britain’s notorious paparazzi, and has basically left the parties and premieres behind. He’s even looking forward to retiring his light saber—and the veil of secrecy that comes with it. “I’m glad there’s only one more [Star Wars] left to do,” he admits. After playing gritty, soul-bearing roles his whole career until George Lucas’s cash cow wandered along, McGregor seems ready to slip back into his old, low-profile life. And way down south in Dixie seems as good a place to start as any. Two months into his Alabama exile, McGregor looks the part in a tan Carhatt jacket, bulge-hugging blue jeans, and tattered black work boots. Throw in the Marlboro Red dangling from his forefingers and you begin to get the picture of a Bud-swiggin’, coonhound-ownin’ badass. The illusion crashed and burns, however, at McGregor’s black-rimmed Poindexter glasses and perfectly slicked and side-parted auburn hair. Good thing he’s got the wheels to make up for it. “That’s my truck,” McGregor says with button-popping, lookee-what-I-got pride. “The foor-door over there.” And she’s a beauty (every truck in the south is a she, after all). A graphite-gray Dodge Ram 1500. A 6,500-pound beast with a 5.7-liter V-8 engine that plays John Holmes to the prepubescent Chevys and Fords idling at the stoplight. “I thought, Well, you’ve gotta try and fit in,” McGregor says. “It’s a fuckin’ ludicrous petrol-consumption type thing. Bush would be very pleased with me, ‘cause I’m wasting an awful fucking lot of gas.” For McGregor, getting a monster truck was more a matter of self-preservation than machismo. While filming Down With Love in Los Angeles, he’d bought a replica of a ’55 Porsche Spyder—the doomed speedster James Dean called Little Bastard, before it killed him. The Spyder was the perfect car for Love, a fluffy, stylized, pastel-colored ode to the studio films of the sixties. It’s the kind of highway hiccup you’d expect to see slaloming down Sunset Boulevard with Doris Day—or, in this film, McGregor’s co-star, Renee Zellweger—at the wheel. Fox studios offered to ship the car to Montgomery, but the aspiring good old boy took a quick look at his mesh-cap-and-giant-belt-buckly surroundings and thought better of it. “I just kept cisualizing the end of the Easy Rider, or some guy hanging out with a shotgun going “Whut canna ker is that, sun?” McGregor says, gurgling in his best redneck. “So I just said, ‘Can you get me a truck instead?” The truck was merely the first step in his transformation into Jim-Bob McGregor. After flirting with the five-string banjo for years, he’s begun tackling it in earnest, going as far as to hire a teacher. He’s tried Skoal (although he’s resigned himself into smoking tobacco rather than sticking it in his mouth), warmed up to flash-fried fried foods, and even eaten pork rinds. But he took his most convincing step toward southern citizenship the first time he braved the wilds of the local Wal-Mart. On an expedition to by a rod and lures for his role in Big Fish, McGregor was soon hypnotized by the glow of fluorescent lights, the smell of the unbathed masses, the wail of snot-nosed children, the seas of frozen food, the great walls of cola, the islands of undergarments. And the guns. Rifles, shotguns, revolvers, BB pistols—all for your rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ pleasure. “You’ve got everything you need in there to go out and do some fucking damage,” McGregor says, somewhere between shock and awe. “You don’t need to go anywhere else.” Even Tim Burton drives in from his temporary home in a more isolated area—what he calls the Blair Witch district of Alabama. “Once you walk into that place, you lose all track of time and space,” he says. “When Ewan came back after his first trip to Wal-Mart, he had this weird gleam in his eye. No matter what country you’re from, it’s a different country down here.” In fact, McGregor’s assimilation would be complete if it weren’t for one unpardonable sin. While the locals can overlook his history of kilt-wearing (though they insist on calling them skirts) and even his eyebrow-cocking flirtations with eyeliner and lipstick, one thing they cannot abide is a squeamish aversion to shooting small, peaceful, and otherwise unarmed animals. You can only parade your Dodge Ram through town so many times before folks begin to wonder why there aren’t any deer carcasses stacked in the back. And one day, under interrogation by the mother’s of Clara’s schoolmates, McGregor caved. “If you wanna go huntin’ anytime, my husband’ll take you,” the moms kept saying. Finally McGregor asked, “Well, what is it they shoot?’” Big mistake. Heads turned, eyeballs bulged, jaws dropped. Finally one woman piped up and ran down the laundry list of animals that carry bull’s-eyes on their backs in ‘Bama. “Basically,” McGregor remembers, “it was everything that breathes that’s not a human being.” Even squirrels were on the menu, it seems. “I can understand deer, because you actually kind of hunt them down,” he says. “But I was like, ‘Why do you wanna shoot squirrels?’” The mother thought for a while until one of them chimed in, “Well, it’s good exercise, because you’re walking up and down hills.” Try as he might to tame his sharp tongue, McGregor couldn’t help himself. ”So’s running around the park,” he blurted. And with that, McGregor’s membership in the Good Old Boys’ Club was officially revoked. BLAH, BLAH, BLAH…TOILET-LUGING JUNKIE IN TRAINSPOTTING…YADDA, YADDA, yadda…singing, dancing beatnik poet in Moulin Rouge…yeah, yeah, yeah…light-saber-swinging swashbuckler in Star Wars…yaaaaawwwwwn…frequently naked…zzzzzzzzzzzz…Scottish. So What? So. Maybe they don’t get Variety around these parts, but the citizens of Wetumpka know all about Mr. Ewan McGregor. And you know what? While the papers and the glossies slobber over one of the most talented, daring, and hardworking actors of his generation, the locals can’t get over his ability—check that—inability to parallel park. This kind of thing is considered near-heresy in a small town where primped prom queens can coax a ’64 Impala into a breakfast nook while pinning on a corsage. “They were filming the bank-robbery scene right over there,” recalls Tammy Lynn, pointing toward the Southern City Savings and Loan across the street. “That’s where it happened.” Lynn has become the horse’s mouth for Big Fish information in this one-horse town. Her store, the Book Basket, has been in business barely a year, and she’s already played host to Tim Burton, who so disliked her front window he had it re-lettered, and the novel’s author, and Alabama native who stopped in for an impromptu signing. But mostly what Lynn gets in the Book Basket is Ewan McGregor fans. Some of them drive as long as fourteen hours to gawk at their beloved Vader hater. And after sharing her behind-the-scenes photos (you can tell which ones her husband took because they’re blurry), Lynn tells them all the sordid truth about their celluloid hero. “He couldn’t parallel park to save his life,” she says, pointing to her picture of McGregor looking ruffled in a cherry-red Dodge Charger for proof. “He’s supposed to be driving the getaway car and Steve Buscemi is the trigger man, but they had to wait for Mr. McGregor to park the car. Poor guy, it took him like seven tries to finally get it right.” Vehicular impotence aside, the fact that anybody would drive fourteen hours just to catch a glimpse of him baffles McGregor. Of course, the ponytailed gaggle of Star Wars fans is mainly to blame. If Trainspotting made him a cutting-edge cult star, he was an outright supernova the minute he became a collectible action figure (with kung-fu grip). Things in London are so bad that the fringe of society that cherishes twelve-sided Darth Maul dice and Chewbacca Underoos will pound his front door seeking autographs. “So I start to explain [to this person] that I don’t sign autographs at my house because, well, it’s my house,” McGregor says. “This is where I live, and my family is here, and we’ve got every right to our privacy, and so on. And after explaining all this to her, she just goes, ‘Well, oh, yeah, but can you just sign this thing right here?” This is another area where Alabama offers a distinct advantage. In the “Heart of Dixie,” where the Second Amendment goes toe-to-toe with the Ten Commandments, nobody is likely to spit if say, a certain well-known Scotsman plugged a barrelful of buckshot in a Sharpie-wielding psycho’s backside. YESTERDAY WAS THE LAST DAY OF FILMING IN DOWNTOWN WETUMPKA. TODAY, Randy Barnes stands on Main Street dodging raindrops, smoking a cigarette, and watching silently as the local construction crews transport Wetumpka 60 years into the future. After months posing as fictitious 1950s mom-and-pop businesses, the Felder Hotel is back to being Rose’s Discount, Joe’s Shoe Repair is once again PHP of Alabama. And the Cornwell Barber Shop? It’s back to being Sisters-N-Effect, an African-American beauty salon. “Most people had a great time, I think,” Barnes says. “But I think everybody here is just glad to get their town back. I’m sure the movie folks will be glad to get to their homes, too.” Not all of them. In fat, there might be one man tooling around Wetumpka in a graphite-gray pickup—he’ll look a bit out of place with those thick, dark glasses, and he’ll have a funny hiccup when he talks—who will miss this old town. “Ya know,” he’ll say, “our life in Alabama is frighteningly dull.” And these days, that’s exactly how Ewan McGregor likes it. |
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