Flaming Nora

WAN McGregor has lost it. Sniffy critics have been saying this for a while and pointing to box office flops like the Nick Leeson biopic Rogue Trader as hard evidence. But, no, this time the Scottish star really has lost it. And in public too. The place is Sydney, the event is the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and Ewan McGregor's invitation was obviously marked "Dress to thrill".

Looking disturbingly like Eddie Izzard, McGregor is wearing what appears to be a leather catsuit; his wild eyes are accentuated by heavy eyeliner, his lips gleam with a slash of scarlet lippy; he waggles his bottle of lager until foam bursts from the neck. As the parade - dykes on bikes, sexually ambivalent scuba divers and so on - pass where McGregor and his wife Eve are standing, the star seems to have a sudden rush of Castlemaine to the head. He dramatically vaults the barricades, gyrates his hips and begins throwing shapes. He keeps this up for little more than a minute but it's more than enough time for the paparazzi flashbulbs to capture this unexpected turn of events for posterity. You might have seen the pictures.

Three months on and Ewan McGregor still has a faceful of slap. This time, though, it's for official reasons - he's fully made-up and on the set of director Baz Luhrmann's (Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet) new film Moulin Rouge. He greets me with a welcoming handshake and a warm smile which slopes between his Germolene-pink cheeks like a comfy hammock. Sadly, before I can climb in, he is whisked off over the road for a take.

Big-budget movies in progress are almost Kremlin-like in their obsession with discretion so it's impossible to say too much about the set of Moulin Rouge. However, what is clear is that, for the past seven months, McGregor has been singing and dancing his way through Luhrmann's musical update on the legend of Orpheus. You know, the bloke who went down to the Underworld to rescue his wife Eurydice. In Moulin Rouge, set in 1899, McGregor plays an absinthe-swigging poet who frequents the notorious Parisian club and there meets, loves and loses a celebrity courtesan played by Nicole Kidman.

In a neat twist of fate, the Orpheus myth deeply informs Ulysses, the epic novel by James Joyce. McGregor plays the Irish writer in the film Nora, which opens in Britain on Friday. Even though he's up to his mascara in Moulin Rouge and, throughout the interview, keeps getting called back onto set, McGregor is desperate to make time to talk about Nora which clearly means more to him than a swanky Winnebago and money in the bank.

"Joyce is the most grown-up character I've played to date," he says, "and a challenging one because he's so complicated. I think he was deeply insecure about lots of things. He was a scared man - terrified of thunderstorms and animals. I was stretched in a way I hadn't been before, so I loved it."

It's safe to say that McGregor has not taken the Method approach to Joyce. He may not like thunderstorms but there is no sign of panic in his face as he runs from the set of Moulin Rouge toward his trailer through a sudden downpour. Maybe he just isn't keen on getting his costume wet. He's wearing a white shirt with a stiff collar, black trousers with braces, and dancing shoes with leather spats.

If he's dressed like a gentleman, he acts like one too. He welcomes me aboard his trailer, invites me to sit on the comfiest- looking seat, hands me a glass of red wine, apologises for keeping me waiting, finds a towel to dry himself off - in that order. He sits down and scrabbles for a cigarette. Stifling a yawn, he doesn't seem to know which to grapple with first, his suffocating, stiff collar or his failing lighter. We set up the tape recorder, I say "So ... Nora ... ," and then there's someone knocking at the door.

"Oh my God," he says. "Hello?"

"Ew-ers?"

"Ye-es."

"We need you," says the voice, which belongs to Baz Luhrmann's assistant.

"Oh, for f*ck's sake," he says, laughing incredulously. "Really? OK."

It's an annoying interruption but gives me a chance to glance round his home from home. It's not exactly basic - there's a television and sound system in here, with CDs including The Verve and Dean Martin stacked next to a few books and a rented videotape of Full Metal Jacket. Perhaps McGregor's friendship with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise (he and his family spent the millennium eve with the couple on a yacht anchored off Sydney) has turned him into a Kubrick aficionado. A skateboard sits on the driver's seat and a wire model of a motorbike perches on a shelf above.

The real thing - his Harley-Davidson Softail - is not in use today. There's a photograph of McGregor and his four-year-old daughter Clara coming down a giant slide, laughing a lot. There's also birthday card that pictures a robot and reads, in gold letters, 29 Today. Given that his birthday was over a month before this interview, we can infer that McGregor is untidy or sentimental or both.

Before I can indulge in too much through-the-keyhole-style speculation, the actor is back and straight back into the interview. He hurls himself in a chair and confesses that reading Joyce's doorstep of a novel Ulysses - widely regarded as the best book ever written - was not part of his research. "It would have taken too long," he says. "I'm not that good a reader yet to read Ulysses. But I read A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and Dubliners and a lot of letters. His photographs are what I drew most from, they gave me the most information. They show how he held himself and he was clearly quite arrogant ..." He pauses and corrects himself. "No, not arrogant, but vain, very aware of himself. And the letters show a lot about his moods and all the aggression and love."

It's always hazardous to draw too many parallels between actors and the characters they play, but it wouldn't be going too far to say that McGregor's assessment of Joyce isn't a million miles away from some character traits of his own. It's interesting the way he spins arrogance into something positive. He does it again when talking about his warp-speed journey from treading the boards in Perth to trading lightsaber blows with Darth Maul.

I ask him if he always knew that he was going to become such a success so quickly. "Yeah, I always did, yeah," he grins. "It's just self-belief I think. I just didn't see it happening any other way. I wouldn't entertain the thought of it not working out. And a form of arrogance probably. And confidence." He pauses and says "I'm an incredibly lucky person" with a wicked, joyful laugh that suggests he thinks he owes more to destiny than fortune.

The only downside of success, he finds, is celebrity. Even in Australia, he is followed by paparazzi photographers, and he gets particularly livid if they manage to snap him with Eve and Clara. At Christmas, a paparazzo caught Ewan and his father as they were peeling off their togs on Bondi Beach. "It's ridiculous," he says, his voice rising to a rant. "Am I meant to go to some canvas-covered beach where famous people go because they're not allowed to have their own lives?

"I really believe it should be illegal to take someone's photograph without their knowledge and publish it, because it's illegal to tap someone's phone and I think it's exactly the same thing. I give most of my life working like this [on film] and it's going to be seen by millions of people, and I don't think anybody has the right to the rest of it. I never allow my daughter to be photographed, 'cause there's too many nutters in the world and I don't want people to know who she is. I want to save her from all that sh*te. If a guy's hiding behind a bus and he takes a picture of her, he's allowed to publish that. He's interfering with my rights to protect my child, and I don't think he has that right."

He's truly serious about wanting to get the paparazzi outlawed. "I'm going to start a society called PAP - I really am maybe going to do this - for People Against Paparazzi, to try and illegalise it. I've got some clout and I'm in a position to do something about it."

Paparazzi apart, he seems to be having a great time in Sydney. He's been seen out at film premieres, in Tatler, a watering-hole for celebrities, and in the cafes of Victoria Street, a trendy strip near where he's living. Now that his family have gone back to Britain, he's staying in a bachelor pad in Potts Point, an art deco enclave perched on the water, close enough to the city to be cool and far enough away to be elegant. "It's a hell of a view," he says. "I'm high up and I've got a balcony on two sides of the flat so I can see right around the harbour."

There's a joke that Australia would be okay if it wasn't for all the Australians but McGregor has no truck with this view. "I've been made aware of how cynical London is by being here," he says. "It's so much more relaxed here, people are much more positive and also there's no sense of class or any of that and therefore people can realise their dreams. Young people can have hopes and aspirations and see them through without any pressure or being told that they're dreamers or that it's a silly idea, people can be who they want to be here. Sydney's very open-minded like that. With respect to being gay, it's a very open place and it seems to go all the way through."

It's just as well he likes it here. When we meet, Moulin Rouge only has a week of filming to go and some of the cast - including Jim Broadbent and John Leguizamo who plays the painter Toulouse-Lautrec - are already departing. However, within a month of Luhrmann's film wrapping, McGregor has to be back at Fox Studios Sydney, this time to start filming the next Star Wars movie. When he signed up for the entire trilogy, he didn't know that George Lucas would decide to make parts two and three in Sydney. That was doubtless a financial decision - the weakness of the Australian dollar makes film production here enticingly cheap - but one that McGregor is clearly quite happy about. "It's a long time to be away from home, but ..." he trails off mysteriously.

Do you miss Britain?

"Not really," he says with an explosive guffaw that threatens to splinter the windows of the Winnebago. "I miss my family, but I don't miss London. I miss Scotland more, but then I'm used to missing Scotland."

How often do you get back there?

"It depends. I was there just before I came here last July. I knew I wouldn't be back there for a long time, so I had to get my fix."

More pressingly, Baz Luhrmann has to get his fix of Ewan McGregor. There's another rap at the door and the actor disappears again to film another scene. When he returns to the bus, he ducks behind a curtain and changes into his own clothes, emerging dressed like an Aussie native in jeans, a Fred Perry shirt and a pair of Blundstone boots. Encouraged by his casual attire, I chance a question about Moulin Rouge.

Luhrmann has said that the experience of making the movie has been "traumatising" for Kidman and McGregor. Is that the case? "Not at all," he says in affronted tones through a fug of Marlboro smoke. "I am not a traumatised person!" And it's true, he doesn't seem even remotely highly-strung. In fact, looking tired but slim and healthy, he appears unusually blessed with self-possession and assurance. He has that star quality that allows certain actors to light up the screen.

McGregor is a major star but that is one role he seems unhappy to play. When I ask whether he feels more at ease walking the streets in Sydney than in Britain, where autograph hunters and sneaky snappers threaten to turn every trip to the shops into an obstacle course, he is dismissive. "I do anyway. I'm never going to change my lifestyle because of things like that. I don't want to start living my life indoors. I think the more you do the more you encourage the myth of fame and stardom. By going round, you demystify it, because there's no myth, there's no mystery, it's just a job. It's a nice, lucky, fortunate, good-fun job, but it is at the end of the day just that."

It's hard to even explain how it is that McGregor has become as big as he has. I suppose it's the double-whammy of Trainspotting and Phantom Menace, the cult classic and the motion picture event. But, to be honest, most of the films he has done have been little movies, character-driven pieces motivated more by love of art than lust for money. Nora has been made by Natural Nylon, the production company McGregor set up with his friends Jude Law, Sadie Frost, Jonny Lee Miller and Sean Pertwee. It has been made with money from several European countries and McGregor for one is relieved that there were no dollars involved. "We wouldn't have been able to make it the way it was made if it had been solely American," he says. "We wouldn't have been able to have it so ambiguous and artistic. It would have been ... more explained." A snort of derision slips into his tone. "And some things in life aren't clear, you know."

The relationship of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle - the literary genius and the chambermaid from Galway, who met in Dublin when he was struggling to get published and she just to get by, ran away to Trieste, had two children and only married 25 years later - is not the sort of syrupy, trauma-free love story that appeals to the average beancounter in Hollywood. Happy-ever-after Joyce and Nora were defiantly not. "They fought like a couple of b*stards," says McGregor, quite cheerfully.

Often dismissed as Joyce's little woman, Nora emerges in Murphy's film as his easy equal, in force of character if not education. As played by the superb Susan Lynch, she is headstrong, passionate, funny, vulnerable and forthright and more than the sum of all these things. Her biographer Brenda Maddox memorably wrote that "She was not shy of calling a penis a prick." McGregor's Joyce has his fair share of rough edges too - he is volatile, selfish, jealous and even cruel. It was the intense dynamic of their relationship, which he feels he understood, that made McGregor want to play Joyce.

"I think all of it's within everybody, in all relationships," he says. "It's quite a clear film about being in love, I think. It's very extreme, but I think it's within us all. I think his desperate need to really push it to the depths, to make it the most meaningful thing ... it's difficult to understand why you would push your lover to take other lovers. It's a confusing thing and I'm terribly romantic about it, but I didn't see it as testing her. I don't know if the idea was that if she gave in, that would be it, I think it was more about pushing it right to the edge."

Pushing it right to the edge is an important idea for Ewan McGregor. Whether he's driving himself to exhaustion by making films back to back without stopping, or driving Hollywood's accountants to distraction by making art movies instead of blockbusters, acting for him in an extreme sport. As the birthday card says, he's only 29 and so entitled to be headstrong and idealistic and dramatic and unpredictable and a little bit crazy. He may be stuck down under for a good while yet, but Ewan McGregor remains on top of the world Nora is released on Friday Ewan McGregor has clambered into the big league, but small is still beautiful to the Star Wars actor. He flings open his trailer door in Sydney to explain why he put James Joyce's lover up in lights in his latest low-budget film

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