Face of a Generation

“When I left home at 16, I was working in this theater backstage, and I remember saying ‘I’d never do an advertisement,’ because I just wanted to do ‘important’ stuff,” McGregor says now. “Of course, I’ve done many advertisements now but I feel like I’ve also been able to make films that have mattered to a lot of people and to do lots of big films, small films, plays, and TV series.”

The busy actor recently spoke with Queue’s Krista Smith about taking on the role of Halston, for which he earned his fourth Emmy nomination, and the experience of playing the mercurial figure whose star burned so brightly — until his life was tragically cut short by AIDS.

Krista Smith: What was it about this man, Halston, that made you curious enough to want to play him and transform into being him, physically, in this series?
Ewan McGregor: Dan Minahan, our director, met me. I must’ve been between films, or I didn’t know what was next. My agents set up one of those afternoons where you meet a few people, and they pitch their ideas to you. I didn’t know anything about Halston. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know his story. But Dan showed me these amazing photographs of him — and there’s lots of amazing photographs of Halston. There was something about the man in these photographs; I was intrigued by it. You could see there was something glamorous and grand about him, but at the same time there’s something steely behind his eyes. The more Dan told me about how famous he was and how iconic he’d been, the more I was like, Why don’t I know this name? I came home from that meeting and started watching interviews with him on YouTube. He had an amazing voice, and he was just fabulous. You could feel it coming off the screen, how interesting he was. So, that was it really. I delved into him, reading the book Simply Halston. I was lucky to go meet some of his friends and some of his colleagues. There’s something complex and intriguing about him. He’s mysterious and loyal and fun-loving and terrifying. I liked that. As an actor, there’s a lot to play with there.

In terms of finding the character, what got you there? Was it the voice? Was it the hair? Was it the way he smoked his cigarette?
EM: It took me a while to feel confident as him. There’s a certain amount of curating of his own character that he did. The first episode’s called “Becoming Halston,” and there was something about the end of that episode where Halston finds “Halston.” He’s coming out of the shower. He’s smoking a cigarette in the mirror while he’s combing his hair back and putting bronzer on, then the sunglasses, then the black turtleneck. When we got to that point of the filming where he becomes the Halston that we know and love, it was easier to feel like Halston.

He loved being Halston. He loved the character that he created, and that’s also what got him into trouble in terms of living that life and spending that money. It’s been said, and I think this is true, that in a lot of ways he was the first influencer; he was so adept at building his brand. But he also had a notorious temper.
EM: He had to deal with this idea of the art and commerce colliding, which I feel like in the movie world, we are faced with all the time. Sometimes it’s a difficult meld, and it certainly was for him, too. He had all these business people coming up with ideas: Okay, you’ve got to do a line of socks. You’ve got to do shoes. You’ve got to do handbags. It was making him very famous, and it was making him very rich, and so he was all for that. But he wasn’t able to let anybody else actually do the work. He could not put his name to something that he hadn’t designed. He couldn’t keep up in the end. During the Studio 54 era, when he started going out and living the life, he couldn’t keep up anymore and came in later and later, and more and more hungover, and found it all more and more panic-inducing. That was a downward spiral, I can imagine.

Do you look at clothes differently now? Is he still living with you in some way?
EM: You know the tailor’s dummies that you drape on? I’ve got some of them in my living room because I think they’re beautiful objects. I would practice on them when I was getting ready to be Halston. I have a sewing machine. I practiced sewing. I was worried that my hands wouldn’t look like they knew what they were doing. We only had certain moments through the series where you see him draping, and for all that’s been written about him, the one thing that wasn’t in dispute was that he was amazing when it came to draping, making dresses. I thought, Christ. If I can get that bit right, if my hands look like Ewan’s hands doing that, that could really be where I come unstuck. So, I worked with Jeriana San Juan, our amazing costume designer, on those moments. There’s lots of footage of him fitting his models, and he’s always standing behind his model but looking in the mirror. There was something amazingly Halston about that. Once I put those two things together, it made me feel like I knew what I was doing a little bit. And I did look at clothes very differently. Probably not so much now, but we started filming in January of last year, before the pandemic hit. I’d walk around the shops in New York and try to figure out how things went together, like, Where’s the seam? Or, How many pieces of fabric is that? I found myself dressing up, even to go out to get a pint of milk. I’d be in high fashion to go and do that. It was fun.

You’ve played characters whose sexual orientation is different from your own in the past. What was different about that experience in 2020?
EM: The nature of shooting sex scenes is different now because, thank goodness, an intimacy coordinator exists. There’s a person whose job is to supervise the intimate scenes as a go-between between the director and the actors. It makes it much more comfortable because everything’s discussed properly beforehand. But the other part of it with Halston was that his sex life was rather private, and there was a part of me that worried that I wasn’t doing him justice by showing it to the world. Halston liked to pay for sex. He liked a quick, transactional situation in his flat. Someone would come over, they’d have sex, and they would leave, and he’d go to sleep. But it was very private. In our series, we were making it very public, and I thought he might not like that. I often thought about him at the monitor, looking over Dan’s shoulder, enjoying what we were doing, going, “Oh, yeah, this is great!” when we’re recreating different moments of his fabulous life. He might have really liked it, but I don’t know about that side of it. Then again, we are telling the story of the man, and this is part of who he was. It was done well, and Dan had such a beautiful take on all of it, always.

You’ve just turned 50. When you look back at your career, do you feel that you could have planned for this success you’ve had? Or was it more taking things one step at a time, and before you know it, you’ve amassed this incredibly diverse resume with films from every genre — horror, sci-fi, indies, rom-coms, musicals? You’ve done all of it.
EM: This is what I wanted out of my career if you’d have asked me when I was at drama school. Because of the loss of somebody I was at drama school with 30 years ago, it’s brought me and my friends who were in my year of drama school in London all back together again. We’re now on WhatsApp group chats. It’s so interesting to be in touch with all these people again from when I was 18, 19, and 20 years old, just starting out trying to become an actor. Now 30 years later, still being one, it has made me reflect on it a little bit more than I might normally do. Also, I’m shooting the upcoming Star Wars TV series Obi-Wan Kenobi right now and have been for the last three months. That’s, of course, going back to a character that’s been so important for my career, that I think I started shooting in the late 90s. That makes you reflect. I feel lucky. I couldn’t have hoped for any better, really. I still don’t seem to deal with it any differently. I still get nervous before a project starts. Every time, I think, I’m not going to be able to do that. This is the character I won’t be able to pull off. This is the one that’s going to end it all. I still have that fear all the time. Two weeks before a start date on anything, I’m a bit of a nightmare to be around.