CINEMA: THE NEXT BRIT BRIGHT STAR

It must have been disorienting for Ewan McGregor when the actor went from the junkie rigors of Trainspotting directly into the pastoral comedy of Jane Austen’s Emma. “On the first day of shooting,” he recalls, “I was riding horses and wearing a top hat, tails and gloves. And I realized that three weeks before, I’d been lying on a floor in Scotland with a skinned head and needles and syringes all around. I wondered what I was doing. Yet I enjoyed it.”

McGregor, 25, has reason to enjoy his busy life. Even before graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he was handed a big role in Dennis Potter’s 1993 TV series Lipstick on Your Collar. His dreamboat looks and what Emma director Douglas McGrath calls “a boyish, endearing playfulness” have won him leads on TV (in the BBC’s Scarlet and Black) and in seven films (including Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, as a full-frontal demon lover) over the past two years. With Trainspotting, McGregor looks set to take Hollywood, if he cares to. Ralph Fiennes, Daniel Day-Lewis, Hugh Grant–beware! Here comes Brit star quality, the next generation.

The Trainspotting team has three scions of earlier film generations. Jonny Lee Miller, who as Sick Boy obsesses over the career of Sean Connery, is the son of actor Bernard Lee–“M” in 11 Bond films. Producer Andrew MacDonald is the grandson of auteur Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes). And McGregor is the nephew of Denis Lawson, a deliciously droll, comic actor in Scottish movies (Local Hero) and West End musicals (Mr. Cinders). Young Ewan, the son of teachers, got the itch to act from Lawson. “I was brought up in Crieff, a small, conservative town,” McGregor says, “and he had long hair, beads and a furry waistcoat. I aspired to be as different as he seemed to me.”

The Trainspotting role of Renton was different. “I liked his ballsy courage and intelligence,” McGregor says. “There’s something exciting about someone that nihilistic.” McGregor shed 28 lbs. to play the wily drug abuser and discussed with director Danny Boyle whether he should try shooting heroin. In the end the actor just said no because it would have been disrespectful to the recovering addicts acting as technical advisers.

McGregor, who calls himself “slightly arrogant and desperately sincere,” last year married French production designer Eve Mouvrakis (they had a daughter this February) and is happy as the darling of the Anglo film circuit. “I won’t buy into the Hollywood thing,” he insists. “I want to be in good movies.” It should be fun watching the battle between a charismatic young actor and U.S. moguls in search of a star.

–By Richard Corliss. Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles