Celebrating Ewan McGregor’s All Too Brief Horror Legacy
Drew Tinnin
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It’s safe to say that Ewan McGregor has reached icon status for a plethora of diverse roles in film and television over the last few decades. His extensive filmography has touched nearly every genre, from ostentatious musicals like Moulin Rouge to the sci-fi blockbusters of Star Wars. In honor of McGregor’s birthday, we’re shining a light on his genre work in hopes that the actor will venture out into the world of horror with a little more frequency.
When most of us were falling in love with horror at a young, malleable age, McGregor was actually scarred for life early on in his movie-watching education. “I was exposed to some really nasty horror movies when I was really young,” McGregor told USA Today. “They’re probably silly now, but at the time when you’re 8, 9 years old, it was just too much for me, and it put me really off.” At the age of 13, McGregor accidentally walked into a screening of John Carpenter’s Halloween. It scared him so badly that he avoided the genre for years.
Luckily, at the start of McGregor’s career, he appeared in a number of genre roles on the big and small screen, taking the kinds of parts that are usually offered to actors starting out trying to make a name for themselves. That led to one of his first major roles with a director that McGregor would go on to have a wondrous working relationship with.
Starting off in the genre world
Most genre fans will remember first seeing McGregor in Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave, a taut thriller told with Hitchcockian flare. After finding their dead flatmate, Alex (McGregor) and David (Christopher Eccleston) discover a suitcase full of cash. As they bicker and fight about how it should be divvied up, they fail to realize that they don’t have a very big head start on the criminals that are after the money.
Filled with dismemberment and plenty of bloodshed and betrayal, Shallow Grave is a prime example of what happens when greed gets in the way of friendship. Boyle would go on to direct his proper zombie horror film, 28 Days Later. And, of course, help to put McGregor on the map with the quintessential heroin chic drama Trainspotting.
In the same year as Trainspotting, McGregor appeared in one of the better episodes of the final season of Tales From the Crypt. “Cold War” is much more fun to revisit now just for the sake of pure ’90s nostalgia. While still firmly set in the underground crime world of London, things take a quick turn into vampire territory. After McGregor’s character, Ford, murders his partner, Jimmy (Colin Salmon), he returns from the dead to enact his revenge. McGregor seems to be having a lot of fun as Ford. He even channels that same level of Cool Britannia energy into his character in “A Life Less Ordinary.”
In 1997, McGregor appeared in what is probably his most horror-adjacent role up until that point in his career. Co-written by Steven Soderbergh, Nightwatch follows a young law student named Martin Bells who starts moonlighting as a night watchman at an eerie morgue. He slowly starts to discover that he may be being set up to take the fall for a series of murders occurring inside the institution.
McGregor would most likely refer to Nightwatch as an old-fashioned, classically structured thriller, not necessarily horror. But it has notes of Giallo films. It also has a lot in common with the medical horrors found in the cold storage freezers of Michael Crichton’s Coma. Nightwatch takes great advantage of the inherent likability of McGregor and this is clearly one of his best early roles.
After his phenomenal turn in Nightwatch, McGregor only appeared in an admittedly watered-down horror anthology called Spooks and Creeps in 2004. He doesn’t even say a word in the short “Desserts”. But he does appear on the truly uninspired cover with Alice Cooper. Don’t bother seeking this out unless you’re a true completist.
The Unlikely Slasher Film
Irvine Welsh wrote a sequel to Trainspotting that eventually got made into a movie twenty years after the original. Ravenous star Robert Carlyle reprises his unhinged role of Begbie, who’s grown even more menacing over the years. Towards the end of T2 Trainspotting, the film takes a sharp turn into slasher territory as Begbie chases after McGregor’s character Renton. Begbie is legitimately terrifying and McGregor shows just how good he could have been if he ever faced Michael Myers in person. After being so frightened by Halloween as a kid, maybe this served as a bit of therapy. In any case, T2 may be the closest McGregor’s fans will ever get to seeing him in a franchise horror film. But one can hope!
Darth Vader has repeatedly been named the greatest villain in cinema history. The Disneynification of Vader has managed to keep him just frightening enough to still be considered threatening. And McGregor finally got his chance to duel with his former padawan once again in the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Inside a fairly tepid series, there are moments of sheer terror when McGregor’s lost version of Obi-Wan has to face his old nemesis when he’s least prepared. Vader toys with him like a sadistic killer, waiting for the right time to enact his true revenge. If McGregor was willing to return after the over-the-top violence at the end of Revenge of the Sith, maybe he’s also willing to return to the horror genre at least one more time.
Redefining a Horror Classic
In a shocking reveal, it seems that audiences didn’t quite understand that Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep was actually a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Had too much time passed for the legacy sequel to really deliver at the box office? The answer, sadly, was yes. But that didn’t stop McGregor from delivering one of his best performances as grown-up Danny Torrance in the actor’s first foray into the world of Stephen King. As mentioned before, McGregor avoided horror movies for years until he started studying the careers of other actors. “I was watching a bunch of Jack Nicholson movies and ended up loving it much more than I thought I would,” McGregor revealed to USA Today. “It’s not a movie like Halloween or a splatter horror film. It’s something much more than that.”
I love that he calls it a “splatter horror film,” don’t you? After an incredible career, hopefully McGregor will dip his toe in genre waters a few more times before he rides off into the sunset. Thank you, Ewan, for your brief stint in horror movies and we wish you the happiest of birthdays here at Dread Central.
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