Ewan McGregor Talks About On-Screen Nudity and His Four-Month Break from Acting

You may not have noticed it, but in his nineteen-year career Ewan McGregor has appeared in 45 films, which is a prolific rate for actors these days.  However, 2012 might be the rare year in which McGregor only appears in one film released this year.

As he tells The Telegraph, the reason for that is McGregor took a rare four month break, which has allowed him to reflect on his varied career and his proclivity of showing a lot of skin in his roles.

McGregor explains that he took the lengthy beak (well, for him anyway) because before then he always felt like he had to work.  He explains, “I finished shooting a film in September, and I just felt I’d worked my ass off for years.  I felt like I just hadn’t stopped. Which I hadn’t. And I realised one day that I didn’t have to work if I didn’t want to. It was like the sky suddenly opening up. I called my wife and suggested that I didn’t work for the rest of the year. And it’s been lovely.”

Perhaps one of the reasons why McGregor has never taken an extended break until now is that he’s never been typecast and thus has always played different types of roles.  “I’m lucky, because I think diversity is what it’s all about,” he says.

But if there is one thing that McGregor might be somewhat typecast in, it’s the fact that he’s often cast in movies that require him to be naked.  Unlike many actors, McGregor doesn’t see nudity as a big deal, pointing out, “The truth is I don’t mind doing nudity if it’s called for.  I’ve not done it in some films when asked to, because I felt it was gratuitous, but films reflect our lives. I love romantic films, and part of that in our modern world is sex. I don’t want to be the guy getting out of bed clutching a pillow to his dick because people don’t do that in real life. If you’ve just spent three hours making love to a woman in bed, you’re not going to be worried about her seeing you when you get up to go to the toilet. At least, I wouldn’t be.”

Well, that might be the first article I ever read that included the phrase, ” clutching a pillow to his dick,” but I can’t say that McGregor is wrong about that, can I?