The King of Scotland

Ewan McGregor has done everything from playing a junkie in Trainspotting to having the guts to wear a rattail in the Star Wars franchise—while vanquishing his own dark side. This month, in a buildup to the biggest move of his career, he puts it all on the line again to direct his first film—an adaptation of Philip Roth’s masterpiece, American Pastoral—and to shout down Boris Johnson.

- Dwight Garner

IT’S A COOL GRAY day in July, and I’m climbing a dormant volcano with Ewan Mc- Gregor. We’re halfway up Arthur’s Seat, a rocky summit that looms over Edinburgh’s medieval Old Town. Robert Louis Stevenson once described this promontory as “a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design,” which is Scottish for “steep as shite.” I’m already winded. McGregor is as chipper as a puppy going for its morning walk. When I stop to catch my breath and soak up the view, he flashes me a grin—that terrific, lupine Ewan McGregor grin—and announces that he can already see tomorrow morning’s tabloid headline: Ewan kills Journo at last. He tips his head back, laughing, and pats me on the sweaty shoulder. Then he gambols up the stony path.

In Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, McGregor hardly needs to kill an out-of-shape journalist to get tabloid attention. He’s here filming the sequel to Trainspotting, the 1996 film that put him on the map as an actor, and the city is pulling for the cast and crew as if they were Scotland’s World Cup team. The original Trainspotting, a black comedy about a cluster of criminally hapless heroin addicts, is beloved here, as it is across Great Britain. (London’s The Observer named it the best British film of the last twenty-five years.) Photographs from the sequel’s shooting fill the front pages of Edinburgh’s newspapers. Teeming crowds gather around roped-off set locations. “I’ve never seen the like of it,” McGregor says about the mania. “People just standing there with a million cell phones, you know?”