20 years on from the original release of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, the director has bravely set about revisiting the film with T2 Trainspotting – and setting all Scottish diet jokes aside, the cast have aged incredibly well. The film was of course, the spark that ignited Ewan McGregor’s career.
McGregor has since gone on to star with his pal Charley Boorman in the popular documentary Long Way Round, which followed the pair’s (eastward bound) journey from London to New York on motorcycles. What might be less known though is that Ewan McGregor also harbours a love for the classic Beetle.
McGregor appears in the new feature length documentary, The Bug – Life and Times of the People’s Car (Firewater Film Company), which covers the vast history of the little car and just why people get so hooked. The trailer certainly looks good.
Ewan and the Beetle
The Trainspotting star has owned several Beetles over the years, even making the tabloids in 2013 when he was spotted in Los Angeles, where he currently resides, filling up his immaculate blue Beetle sedan, which he had acquired in 2009. It was clear that the favourable West Coast weather was clearly doing the paintwork more favours than a Scottish winter.
A year ago McGregor sold a different Beetle on eBay to make way for yet another Beetle purchase. The 1960 rat look Beetle was listed as ‘Ewan McGregor’s 1960 VW Ragtop Patina Monster’ and sold for $28,500 (£20,000) in April 2016 – more than twice what he was expecting. The car had a carefully preserved rusted exterior coated in clear lacquer.
£20,000 might seem a lot on the (literal) surface, but McGregor knows his stuff, and the Beetle was more or less an inside out, reversed restoration project, with what you can see being either original or aged, while the crucial mechanical bits that get you from A to B and enable you to stop safely were either upgraded, replaced or restored. One of the most impressive things about this bug is that the bonnet isn’t original and was very carefully colour matched and blended with the rest of the car.
McGregor had actually spotted the build project online and contacted the owner to make the purchase, which then became his daily transport to a film set in Pennsylvania where he was currently working before getting it shipped to his home in LA, 2,600 miles away across the other side of America.
Ewan’s love for the Beetle had begun as a teenager when he bought a South African import for £500 in 1987 and he talks fondly about this car in The Bug. It must have stuck in his mind, as in 2015 McGregor even tried to trace this original purchase, presumably to re-buy it before he finally settled on the amazing rat look Beetle.
If you like the trailer and you fancy tracking down this movie, it won’t prove quite as difficult as a South African bug in Scotland, as you can now purchase The Bug – Life and Times of the People’s Car on Amazon.
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