Ewan McGregor, the veteran Scottish actor who recently earned some of the best reviews of his 30-year career for his performance at the center of the Paramount+ limited series A Gentleman in Moscow, on which he also served as an executive producer, has been tapped for the Newport Beach Film Festival’s (NBFF) TV Performance of the Year Award.
McGregor, 53, will be celebrated at an event that will kick off Tuesday, Oct. 22, at 5:30 p.m. PT, at the Pelican Hill Resort in Newport Beach. To begin with, he will sit down with yours truly for a career-retrospective conversation that will be recorded for subsequent posting as an episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast. Then, the fest will present him with his award.
“The Newport Beach Film Festival could not be more honored to bestow this award to Ewan McGregor for his legendary career,” Gregg Schwenk, NBFF’s CEO and executive director, said in a statement. “He is a true powerhouse who has left a mark not only on the audiences who enjoy his incredible array of projects, but on the industry as a whole.”
McGregor first rose to prominence as the star of 1995’s Trainspotting, then shot to stardom playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in the second Star Wars trilogy (1999-2005), and has further distinguished himself in numerous films (e.g. 2001’s Moulin Rouge!, 2003’s Big Fish, 2010’s The Ghost Writer, 2012’s The Impossible) and TV programs (he won an Emmy for the 2021 limited series Halston and Golden Globe and Critics Choice awards for the 2023 limited series Fargo).
A Gentleman in Moscow, which rolled out March 29 through May 17, is an adaptation of Amor Towles’ 2016 novel. In it, McGregor plays Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, an aristocrat who, after returning to Russia from Paris following the October Revolution, is sentenced to house arrest by a Bolshevik tribunal and spends decades in an attic hotel room.
The 25th NBFF will be held Oct. 17-24, 2024. Peter Sarsgaard will be fêted with the Film Performance of the Year Award for his work on September 5 — and will also record a live episode of the Awards Chatter podcast — on Oct. 23.
Other honorees at this year’s fest will include Nicolas Cage (Icon Award), Joan Chen (Career Achievement Award), Colman Domingo (Maverick Award), Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Sheryl Lee Ralph (Artist of Distinction Awards), George MacKay (Spotlight Award), June Squibb (Lifetime Achievement Award), Diane Warren (Lifetime Achievement in Music Award), Colleen Atwood (Career Achievement in Costume Design), David Alan Grier and Wendi McLendon-Covey (Outstanding Achievement in Comedy Award), Terry Crews (Arts Champion Award), Jane Lynch (Outstanding Achievement in Comedy Award), Finneas O’Connell (Outstanding Achievement in Music Award on October 21) and Christoph Waltz (Icon Award).
