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“Getting to play opposite my wife, Mary, who’s an amazing actor, playing these two great roles together – and with all the other cast too – it was absolutely magnificent.”
McGregor and his wife used an intimacy co-ordinator for their bedroom scenes: “It’s still necessary because it’s also about the crew,” McGregor says. “And it’s odd to be naked in front of people, it’s odd to be intimate in front of the camera.”
As a landed aristocrat in post-tsarist Russia, Count Rostov finds that his gilded past leaves him squarely in the Bolshevik firing line.Credit: Ben Blackall/Paramount+
But the relationship on set was professional at all times – no laughing at his moustache, for example.
“Well, I mean, we’re both actors. So that’s our job! I’m not looking across at my wife pretending to be someone else – I feel like the count and I’m speaking to Anna. It’s interesting doing interviews like this where you realise people’s perceptions of what we do is really different from what it actually is like, completely wrong. We didn’t burst out laughing at each other!”
Even though, I point out, McGregor was operating with a full perm.
“It’s my own hair! I went to a salon in London that I’ve been to over my career. And here I was getting a full perm with the make-up designer behind me and everything. Afterwards I looked in the mirror and I was like, f---ing hell! That’s amazing. Because immediately you’re a different person. I’d do it again – I’m looking for another curly haired character right now because I liked the perm.”
This is, in fact, McGregor’s second permed role. His first was in his big TV break, working with the late, great British TV auteur Dennis Potter on the classic Lipstick on Your Collar. The two productions are benchmark television but from very different eras.
“There’s something similar about that and A Gentleman in Moscow in that in its day Lipstick on Your Collar was so prestigious – I was so lucky that that was my start. But certainly the movies have changed and the industry has changed.”
The middle part of McGregor’s career was spent doing mid-budget movies like Velvet Goldmine, I Love You Philip Morris and The Men Who Stare At Goats. “$30-$40 million movies,” he says. “And those have gone. Now that kind of budget of movie is usually made for television.”
It’s not specifically the numbers, he says, but the content that he misses.
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“I don’t mean the money, but just that kind of movie about people or whatever. Not superhero stuff, not $200 million movies — that middle bit has sort of disappeared.
“I didn’t see the Oscars, but I was reading about them and somebody in their speech made a plea to Hollywood to make twenty $10 million movies instead of one $200 million movie and I thought, oh yeah, that’s dead on.”
He points to a film he has just made with his daughter Clara called Bleeding Love.
“We made that for not very many dollars … and it stands on its own feet. It’s still a story that hits you. And then there’s all these $200 million movies … that may not.”
The hope is that A Gentleman in Moscow will sit somewhere between the two – lavish entertainment with the story of one man at its heart.
A Gentleman in Moscow is now streaming on Paramount+.
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