Ewan McGregor talks about prepping for roles and acting in blockbusters

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From Moviefone:
How did you prep for the role of the Pope’s right-hand man, the Camerlengo Patrick Mckenna?
I had to get a sense of his world. So I had to get all the background on the Vatican and being a priest, but that’s quite difficult to do. We weren’t allowed to film in the Vatican, [and] we didn’t get any help from them in terms of background, so I had to look at some documentaries about the … workings of the Vatican and Swiss Guard and stuff. But to be honest, they’re very boring to watch … really quite tedious in fact, so I watched as much as I could. But I had a very good adviser that was a father from New York who was my priestly adviser. He was on set all the time whenever we had to do any of the ceremonial stuff, or any of the ritual stuff, things in the Catholic church, because I wasn’t really familiar with those. And then also he was on hand to talk to me about being a priest and fill me on the kind of pecking order between cardinals and priests and high priests.

Did the controversy surrounding the movie affect your decision about taking on the role?
No, because I didn’t think that there was any. I didn’t feel like when I read the script there was anything controversial about it; there’s nothing that’s anti-Catholic. If there had been anything that I felt kind of dissed someone else’s religion, I wouldn’t have been involved in it. I’m not interested in doing that kind of thing. I just thought it was a really good thriller, a fast-paced kind of edgy thriller set in the world of the Vatican, which is a world we don’t know much about, and it’s a high-powered world, so that makes the stakes quite high. The people in the Catholic church in the movie who are the evildoers get their comeuppance in the end, and it’s quite clear that the Catholic church shuns them and punishes them and isn’t condoning their behavior in any way. In any walk of life there are people that are good people and there are occasionally people that do crazy things for whatever reason, you know?

You mostly act in smaller or independent films, but ‘Angels & Demons’ and obviously ‘Star Wars’ were huge studio productions — how do the experiences differ?

You play Gene Vidal in the upcoming ‘Amelia’ — because he’s a real person, did that affect how you played him or how you prepped for the role?
It does in a way … I’ve found a great many photographs of him and read about him … but I [had to] trust that he was in the script. Whenever I’ve played somebody that’s real, I find that photographs … are really telling to me. When I played James Joyce [in 'Nora'], the pictures of him were very important to the way I acted physically, and I suppose with Gene Vidal it’s the same

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