Motorbikes do something to Ewan McGregor. His eyes sparkle and his conversation revs up at the mention of his favourite machines. This is a man who travelled 19,000 miles across the world’s roughest terrain on a BMW and the experience has done nothing to diminish his passion.
“It’s a beautiful piece of kit,” he enthuses about his latest acquisition, the 11th bike in his collection. “Though my wife is going, ‘Oh no! Not another one!’ ”
The actor succumbed to temptation on location in the Isle of Man. “There’s a TT museum run by a guy called Paul Murray,” says McGregor. “I went to visit it, but I had to phone them because it was shut. He was closing down the museum and selling off all the bikes.
“I thought that was a bad move, so I went up there and came back with a 1929 Rex-Acme TT racer.”
Now he plans a new adventure with his best friend Charley Boorman and the cameraman Claudio von Planta.
Two years ago their trip through Europe, Asia and America was made into Long Way Round, a television series and book. Their next journey will take them from John o’Groats to Cape Town in the new year.
The trip is more than just a daring escapade with the lads. He will use it, like Long Way Round, to publicise the work of Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, for which he is an ambassador. McGregor may look boyish, but he is a father of three who takes his responsibilities seriously.
With his neatly cut hair and sober jumper, the man in front of me resembles a distant, respectable cousin of Mark Renton, the cheeky junkie who burst onto cinema screens in the 1996 hit Trainspotting.
His new film, a biopic of the Edwardian children’s author Beatrix Potter, explores very different territory from Irvine Welsh, the poet laureate of the chemical generation and the author of Trainspotting, to whom McGregor owed much of his early fame.
Miss Potter is a gentle period drama in which McGregor plays Norman Warne, the publisher with whom the heroine develops a close, though chaste, relationship, leading to a secret engagement. It was filmed in the Lake District and the Isle of Man, affording him the opportunity to indulge his motorcycle obsession.
The star of Moulin Rouge and Star Wars was approached to appear in the film by Renée Zellweger, who was an executive producer as well as its star.
The two had played opposite one another before, in the 2003 film Down with Love. A romantic comedy in the style of the successful Rock Hudson/Doris Day movies, the quick-witted exchanges were exhausting for both actors.
“It was a very specific kind of 1960s’ sex film comedy,” he explains.
“It was very hard work. Sometimes if the timing wasn’t absolutely right on the dialogue, those scenes would fall flat on their faces.”
In these moments, the two stars often looked at each other and said: “I wish we could just be doing something straightforward.” Zellweger was true to her word. She sent McGregor the script of Miss Potter a couple of years later. He was hugely flattered.
“It was absolutely what we had been talking about, a beautiful story and a simple, kind of straightforward one.”
Beatrix Potter was born into a rich London family in 1866. As a girl she wrote illustrated stories inspired by her pet animals, including a rabbit called Peter and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle the hedgehog. The resulting stories reflect a passion for the countryside acquired during her family holidays in Perthshire and the Lake District.
It was an era when a young lady’s priority was securing a well-bred and wealthy husband. Pursuing a career and earning one’s own living were not thought respectable. The film presents Potter as a relatively independent- minded woman, whose values were not entirely in keeping with those of her class or time. Still single in her thirties, she made a little money creating illustrations for greetings cards.
Then she met Warne, a younger brother in a family publishing company. He encouraged her to write and helped build up her confidence. A regular visitor to tea at the Potter family home, he one day surprised Beatrix by proposing marriage.
They secretly became engaged despite fierce opposition from Potter’s parents, who did not want her to marry someone who was “in trade”. As the film details, their disapproval was not the only obstacle to the couple’s happiness.
McGregor’s principal inspiration for the role of Warne was a collection of photographs. “I think there’s a lot you can sense from photographs,” he said.
The young publisher is a gentleman in every sense of the word. This makes him a very different sort of leading man from those McGregor has played in notorious, sexually explicit films such as Young Adam and The Pillow Book. He believes he now gets the chance to play a wider range of roles, and jokes that he no longer has to show his penis in every film.
One might also be forgiven for assuming he was attracted to the Warne role because of Potter’s strong Scottish connections. She spent family holidays in Dunkeld, Perthshire, close to McGregor’s childhood home in Crieff. It was here, not the Lake District, that her most famous creature was born.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit first appeared as an illustrated letter to a friend’s son, written from Scotland in 1893. Mr McGregor, the grumpy gardener who plans to put Peter in the pot, is almost certainly inspired by a local man from Dunkeld.
But film-makers do not like to be burdened with too much extraneous detail. So for the sake of simplicity, the genesis of Peter Rabbit is relocated from Perthshire to the Lake District, where Potter also spent childhood holidays and much of her adult life after becoming a bestselling author. Most of the filming was done in Cumbria and the Isle of Man.
McGregor was unaware that Peter Rabbit was practically a neighbour. As to the snubbing of his native land, he adopts an expression of mock horror: “I didn’t know that . . . I’m taking my name off the end of the film!”
If you look closely, however, Scotland does make it to the screen — disguised as the lakes. The director, Chris Noonan, whose previous credits include the 1995 hit Babe, spent a week shooting scenes around Loch Lomond. Boturich Castle estate, Finnich Malise at the southern end of the Loch and even Ben Lomond can be seen. The Scottish footage was included to accommodate Emily Watson, who plays Warne’s sister and who was working simultaneously on The Waterhorse, which was then being made in Scotland. Zellweger and Watson filmed for a week, though McGregor was not involved.
Despite his obvious enjoyment at being involved with the project, he admits an ignorance of Potter before Zellweger’s script landed in his lap. Generations of children have been entertained by the antics of Peter, Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddle-Duck and Jeremy Fisher. But young McGregor was not one of them. He preferred The Broons. He laughs at the suggestion that the moustache he grew to play Warne makes him look like Hen, the lanky older brother in the doughty Dundonian family.
“A Broons movie would be great for sure,” he says. “My friend Douglas Henshall was always talking about doing a Broons movie!”
He admits he was never a great reader and his favourite childhood story was Harry Nilsson’s The Point, which was a record rather than a book. “My uncle Denis [Lawson, the actor] got it for me I think.”
Once he started filming Miss Potter, though, he began to notice her work everywhere.
“My parents sent down the complete works of Beatrix Potter when my daughter, Clara, was born. Then I started noticing we had eggcups and plates, stuff all over the house.”
The film has given McGregor a new respect for the author — he now has a “deluxe” set of her books and reads them to his children.
“I didn’t know anything about her and that’s why I’ve enjoyed the script so much. You discover what an extraordinary woman she was.”
Miss Potter opens nationwide on January 5
When Potter captured Perthshire
Potter’s father, Rupert, rented a country house every summer, first in Perthshire then later on in the Lake District, and many of her characters were based on the small animals she “adopted” during childhood family holidays.
At the Birnam Institute (01350 727674; www.birnaminstitute.com) the exhibition The Fascinating Acquaintance details the story of the young author’s friendship with a local naturalist, Charles McIntosh. The two shared a mutual interest in wildlife and in particular fungi.
The nearby Beatrix Potter Garden re-creates the characters and settings of her work with footpaths that lead down to houses of Mr Tod and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.
Visitors can also see the stream and pond that was home to Mr Jeremy Fisher and, of course, Peter Rabbit’s burrow.
Perth Museum and Art Gallery (01738 632488; www.pkc.gov.uk) has a collection of 25 of Potter’s watercolours of fungi as well as specimens, correspondence and memorabilia belonging to Charles McIntosh. When Potter captured Perthshire
