If McGregor ever feels any fear, it never shows. In "Little Voice," he's saddled with a dreadful role of male wallflower -- he's a pigeon keeper who falls for the movie's main character, LV (the magnificent Jane Horrocks), a withdrawn young girl with the uncanny ability to mimic go-for-broke singers like Judy Garland and Shirley Bassey -- but he elevates it without even trying. When he kisses one of his beloved birds on the head, or looks at LV with lovestruck wonder, his boyish innocence is miraculously easy and unforced; he hangs back just enough to make the performance work, whereas lesser actors would turn the tap on full blast. And he's the emotional anchor at the center of the feverish, messy and oddly wonderful "A Life Less Ordinary." He and his cohort Celine (Cameron Diaz) pause to kiss in the parking lot of a bank, just after they've robbed it. He happens to glance toward the back seat of their getaway car and suddenly has a premonition of her slumped down there, her stomach a bloody hole. He turns back to look at the real Celine, standing in one piece before him, and looks at her quizzically, forlornly: The wind has been knocked out of him by the prospect, glimpsed only in a brief hallucination, of losing her so soon after he's found her. It's a mystically lovely moment, one that encapsulates in a fragile bubble the sensation of suddenly realizing that you can't live without someone.

In Todd Haynes' clumsy but well-intentioned "Velvet Goldmine," McGregor plays the quintessential bad-boy rock star, only badder. Onstage, scrawny, shirtless and raw, he's the picture of voraciously omnisexual masculinity -- like Mick Jagger with balls instead of nuts. His Curt Wild is a naked ape who comes wrapped only in his own mythology. He grew up in a trailer park, had some vaguely defined relationship with a pack of wolves and was forced to undergo shock treatments as a kid ("to fry the fairy right out of him," according to one character). What's wonderful about the performance is the way McGregor balances the feral sexual menace of his character with a carefully veiled yet undeniable crushability. When Wild kisses Arthur (played by Christian Bale), it's his sexuality -- not necessarily his homosexuality -- that shines through. It's not that the homoerotic quality of his scenes is in any way denied or downplayed; it's just that McGregor is so believable as a lover, so free of awkwardness or shyness, that his character doesn't seem to be wearing any kind of a gay/straight/other ID label -- he's a sensual human being, plain and simple, a quality that's shockingly elusive in portrayals of gay, lesbian and straight characters in the movies these days.

Strangely enough, maybe it's that sensual freedom that puts McGregor squarely in league with old-time Hollywood leading men. Movies are so different now. Comparatively, they're more open about sex and love and longing -- but they're not necessarily more honest. It's actors like McGregor who can keep them honest, who can be purely sexual in the way they speak and move, even as they clearly have no interest in the game-playing of machismo. Like his forebears, McGregor understands that sometimes the most deeply sensual gestures are the seemingly small ones, like the shy flicker of an eye or the tenderness in a smile. McGregor isn't a leading man in the old-fashioned sense -- he's far too visceral for that -- but even his rawest performances show a kind of delicacy. If the best acting is really just another kind of singing, a way of connecting with an audience in a way that's verbal on the surface but infinitely more complicated below it, then McGregor is both a rock star and a crooner, often at the same time -- and he knows how senseless it would be to even try to choose between the two.
salon.com | May 12, 1999

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