Ewan McGregor on acting the part of a captive aristocrat caught up in the Russian Revolution, playing sex scenes with his wife, and the perils of bringing up four daughters
A Gentleman in Moscow
Available to stream from Good Friday Paramount+
SOME FANCIED RICHARD E GRANT for it. A colleague insisted on Benedict Cumberbatch, and I’ve heard convincing arguments for Kenneth Branagh. There was even wild talk of Robert Downey Jr. But of the millions who fell for A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles’s internationally successful 2016 novel setting Bolshevism against breeding in the moustachioed, perfectly tailored form of Russian aristocrat Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, how many had Obi-Wan Kenobi down for the lead role?
“It’s true that we feel a personal connection when we fall in love with a piece of writing,” says Ewan McGregor of readers’ possessiveness of the part. “But I felt like it was mine, because I had that connection with the writing. I thought, ‘I know how to play him.’”
He was right. The 52-year-old actor, in black T-shirt and heavy-rimmed spectacles, sipping his morning coffee in a New York hotel room, has pulled it off, big time. McGregor gives a nuanced and occasionally rip-roaring performance as Rostov, the aristocrat hauled before a Communist tribunal in 1922. Thousands of class enemies are being killed, but the Count is spared the firing squad on condition he never leaves the grand Metropole Hotel he’s staying in.
In that sense, the eight-part Paramount+ series is about confinement and how we survive it, resonant themes since lockdown. But as it charts the Red Terror, Stalin’s 1930s purges and the gulags in Siberia, the series is also, inescapably, about Russia’s periodical descent into bloody discord. Tellingly, it arrives just weeks after the death of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny in a Siberian penal colony. “It’s diabolical, dreadful,” says McGregor. “He tried to stand up against Putin and ended up dead.”
He is similarly torn by the war in Ukraine, a country he crossed from west to east with Charley Boorman for the BBC’s 2004 travelogue Long Way Round. “We had this extraordinary love for Ukraine and the people we met. This invasion is so old-fashioned and stupid. The Russia of today was born in the [Bolshevik] revolution – there’s a direct link to Putin. I’m happy we’re telling a story that’s relevant.” He’s been telling on-screen stories since appearing in Dennis Potter’s Lipstick on Your Collar in 1993. His career took off with Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting in 1996 and went interstellar when he signed up to the Star Wars franchise. (And, if George Lucas is reading, “I’d love to do another
