In 'Ghost Writer,' actor Ewan McGregor is just a shadow of himself

In Roman Polanski’s new politically charged thriller “The Ghost Writer,” Scotland’s Ewan McGregor has the unenviable task of playing a character with whom he has nothing in common: an English ghost writer who’s asked to replace another ghost in writing the autobiography of a controversial former British prime minister.

“I’ve never had to write about anybody,” said McGregor. “My character finds himself in a very particular scenario. He’s not a stranger to this; we know that he’s written other books, even though they’ve mostly been about aging rock stars.” But having to write about a politician instead of a guitarist is the least of the ghost’s problems.

“He realizes pretty early on that he might be in for a lot of work,” said McGregor. “He’s expected to produce the finished book in a month, but he was led to believe it was nearly written and just needs tidying up. Then he finds out it’s not very well written.” That’s the problem – one that will be compounded by much more serious lies – of the character.

McGregor found a different set of challenges as an actor, mostly because some of his subject’s traits and situations mirror real-life people and scenarios. Even though former Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) and the deception around him are fictional, most informed viewers will conjure up images of Tony Blair and Haliburton.

“When I first read the script, I was well aware of that,” said McGregor, who believes that author Robert Harris, whose novel “The Ghost” is the source material for the script he worked on with Polanski “wrote his book thinking about Tony Blair.”

McGregor said his chief task was to forget about the real guy, and concentrate on playing his fictional character.

“When you’re reading a script for a character, you read it more looking through the eyes of that guy,” he said. “I was trying to look through the eyes of the ghost and imagine what it would be like. So I wasn’t that much aware of the political impact of the piece. I was reading it thinking about playing him.”

McGregor considers himself the luckiest actor in the film because he was on set from the first day of shooting until the last, and had the opportunity to watch Polanski at work.

“Roman drives you quite hard,” he said. “And you’re called on to look for great detail. You don’t need to worry about how long a scene is. He just wants you to move from point to point as honestly as possible.”

Once again, there were more challenges, since there’s literally no back story for the ghost.

“We don’t know very much about him,” he said. “But the way I played him is pretty much the way I imagined him when I first read the script. I saw a man who’s not that interested in politicians, or politics, not really impressed by anyone or anything. He probably has a certain amount of failure in his writing career, because he’s ghostwriting books. Harris suggests that when you’re not putting your name on your own work, when you’re writing under someone else’s name, there’s a certain failure aspect about that. But I also saw him as someone who’s quite content, not that bothered by it. He doesn’t give a damn about much.”

Yet it’s in part of the ghost’s makeup that McGregor found at least some connection to the character. He’s not interested in politics or politicians, either.

“I never read about them,” he said. “I just can’t find myself to be interested because I don’t believe in them very much. In Britain they seem to prove over and over that they’re not particularly trustworthy.

“I find them to be fairly despicable people,” he added, with a slight laugh, then got serious. “But I am a member of the world, and I’m interested in the world. I have a strong sense of things that are right and wrong. I just think that politicians are often not the people that make a difference.”