silversolitaire

Love Machine

In his new film, Down With Love, Ewan McGregor plays the kind of role made famous by Rock Hudson. He sat down to discuss the character, how he loves playing gay, and why Star Wars didn’t live up to his expectations. We also reveal the secrets behind a very lucky piece of terry cloth.
By Jeffrey Epstein

Ewan McGregor is in a towel.
That's it. Just a towel.
As I walk onto Stage 4 at the Hollywood Center Stages, where this spring's romantic comedy Down With Love is filming, I hit the elaborate set of the Know magazine offices. McGregor, as womanizing journalist Catcher Block, is filming a scene with David Hyde Pierce, who plays his best friend and neurotic boss. Did I mention he was in a towel?
"He's been working out with a trainer for weeks now," confides Dan Jinks, who is producing the film with business partner Bruce Cohen (the Out 100 alums won the Academy Award for producing American Beauty). "He looks incredible."
"I've never been less naked in almost any film I've ever been in," cracks McGregor after filming for the day is complete. We're sitting at an umbrella table outside his dressing room. Wearing a blue T-shirt, jeans, and cute camouflage sneakers, the actor, long familiar to queer audiences for gay moments in The Pillow Book and Velvet Goldmine, is now fully clothed and smoking the first of many American Spirit cigarettes. "Usually I've got all my kit off, and I've never bothered working out," he says.
"He's supposed to be this macho playboy guy," says Jinks of McGregor's character. "We wanted to accentuate the leading-man body."
In Down With Love, McGregor is taking on the type of role that was created by another famous leading man: Rock Hudson. The film, set in 1963 Manhattan, is an homage to the Rock Hudson-Doris Day films of that era, such as Pillow Talk (which, coincidentally, was made by gay producer Ross Hunter) and Lover Come Back. Renée Zellweger plays Barbara Novak, an author whose book, Down With Love, encourages women to act more like men. McGregor's Block is determined to prove that the book is a fraud by seducing Novak. And in the fashion of the films of that time, mistaken identity, double entendres, and lots of fabulous costumes add to the mix.
Unlike most of today's movies, Love is filming entirely on Hollywood soundstages, with just four days on the Universal back lot for exteriors-no shooting in New York City. But the Los Angeles production is a blessing for McGregor, whose wife, Eve Mavrakis, and daughters, Clara and Esther, flew over from England for the duration of filming.
"It's the nicest thing," says McGregor, a native of Scotland. "It was great to come to L.A. and get a bit of sun. I love the routine. Leaving them in the morning, going to work, and going back to them. It's like real life."
Growing up, McGregor was a fan of the films to which Love tips its hat. "I used to watch them all as a kid," he recalls. "Rock Hudson seemed to be breezing through them and having a good time. When he laughs, it looks like it's him having a great laugh. So I tried to follow suit."
Of course, gay audiences have long been loving McGregor, known for hot man-on-man action in films like The Pillow Book and Velvet Goldmine-something he never thought twice about.
"I remember I heard Sharon Stone once say, 'I'll never do nudity again,'" he says. "I just question that. As an actor you should be excited to portray anything and everything. It was weird with me and the Japanese guy in The Pillow Book because it was the first time I'd ever done a gay sex scene. But it was just as strange for me the first time I had to do a straight sex scene-there's really no difference. And I loved it."
In fact, he talks about it all the time. On a break while taping a television show in Britain, the host said he'd be asking about filming that scene in The Pillow Book. "I thought they were changing videotapes, and I ended the break saying, 'I'm going to have to find a way to answer that without using the words 'smooth, leathery scrotum.' I thought they were changing tapes, but when it aired on television, they included that." So how does "smooth, leathery scrotum" come up in conversation? "That's all I could remember about it," shrugs the actor, taking another drag off his cigarette. "I have quite the memory of his scrotum, for some reason. I don't know why."

To read more about Ewan McGregor and Down With Love, pick up the April issue of Out.