The gloves are off in the showdown between Ewan McGregor and Piers Morgan.
The outspoken British TV presenter is fighting back after McGregor refused to appear on “Good Morning Britain” following Morgan’s comments on the Women’s March. Morgan, whose Twitter profile picture shows him with Donald Trump, had tweeted his opposition to the global Women’s Marches over the weekend, leading “T2: Trainspotting” star McGregor to back out of an appearance on his show.
McGregor, who reprises his role as former heroin addict Mark Renton in the “Trainspotting” sequel, has been promoting the film along with co-stars Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Ewan Bremner and Kelly Macdonald following the film’s Scottish premiere over the weekend. The sequel picks up 20 years after the events of the first film. McGregor was scheduled to promote the film on “Good Morning Britain”, which is hosted by Morgan.
Morgan drew the ire of McGregor, 45, after the former tweeted his distaste for the Women’s March held on January 21. He tweeted: “I’m planning a ‘Men’s March’ to protest at the creeping global emasculation of my gender by rabid feminists. Who’s with me?” on Saturday.
Never one to keep his opinion to himself, Morgan has now written an angry rebuttal in his column on Mail Online, calling McGregor a “pedophile-loving hypocrite” for working with Roman Polanski on “The Ghost Writer” back in 2010.
Morgan explains he has met the Scottish actor on two occasions and found him “charming” and “friendly,” writing, “We talked about life, kids, movies. I liked him a lot.” While that may have been true once, Morgan definitely doesn’t feel that way about the actor now, as he goes on to detail the timeline of events leading up to McGregor’s cancelled appearance.
“[…]McGregor apparently hadn’t realized I was going to be involved with the interview. He refused point blank to do it unless I was removed and it was performed by my co-host Susanna Reid. This demand was denied, as were further demands for the interview to be severely shortened and to be restricted purely to talk about his new movie, ‘T2 Trainspotting’,” Morgan writes in his column. “So, enraged that he couldn’t do the interview on the terms he wanted, McGregor left.”
“In the studio itself, we were warned there may be a slight ‘issue’ with McGregor appearing on the sofa, five minutes before he was due on. I checked Twitter in the next commercial break and discovered the ‘issue’,” referring to McGregor’s tweet.
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Morgan criticizes McGregor for letting viewers who were eager to see the highly promoted interview before digging into the actor’s political beliefs and mocking the actor’s online fans.
“Ewan McGregor is a very angry man when it comes to his politics. A flick through his Twitter feed today revealed a man absolutely enraged by both Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency, and by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union,” he says. “His fury at the latter may strike some as slightly disingenuous given that McGregor himself quit the EU years ago to go and live the life of a pampered millionaire movie star in Hollywood. But I’ll leave others to decide whether that is hypocritical or not.”
“One thing’s for sure: Ewan McGregor wants you all to know, very very loudly, that he HATES TRUMP AND BREXIT,” Morgan writes. “That’s fine. Nearly half of those who voted in the US election and EU referendum didn’t agree either. But both results came after free, fair elections. It’s called democracy.”
“But by refusing to be interviewed by me simply because I have a different opinion about a political march, McGregor revealed himself to be a narrow-minded, stupendously self-aggrandizing, anti-democratic little twerp,” he continues.
“Had we done the interview, I might have asked him how his heroic support for women justified him working for director Roman Polanski, a self-confessed and convicted child abuser, on the film, ‘The Ghost Writer’. ‘He’s a legendary filmmaker, one of the best,’ gushed McGregor in a 2010 interview about the pedophile, for whom Meryl Streep once gave a standing ovation at the Oscars,” Morgan says, adding, “A new warrant was issued for Polanski’s arrest during the movie’s post-production stage. McGregor, who has four young daughters, was asked about it and said: ‘I felt sad for Roman because he’s an old man who I’m incredibly fond of. I like him as a man.'”
Morgan accuses the actor of using his outrage to drum up buzz for his “Trainspotting” sequel, which opens in UK theatres this week.
“Ewan McGregor had his fun with me today and gained plenty of publicity for his movie in the process, which may well have been his main motivation all along,” he adds.
McGregor has not addressed Morgan’s comments.
