Inside Ewan McGregor’s Enchanting Take on ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ (2024)

In the 2016 novel A Gentleman in Moscow, the Russian count Alexander Ilyich Rostov carries a joie de vivre you can see right there on his face. He wanders around his fabulous hotel residence with his “waxed moustaches spread like the wings of a gull,” not a whisker out of place. As the book developed into a publishing blockbuster, going on to sell more than a million copies around the world, its tender hero’s twirl became a kind of literary trademark—one that Ewan McGregor, as the actor chosen to take on the role, needed to justly honor.

“I was adamant that I have my own,” McGregor says. “I grew my own beard, and then shaved the beard off and left this pretty monstrous mustache.” He maintained the look for nearly a year, keeping it over the course of production—a demanding shoot that included a four-month hiatus imposed by the actors strike. “He’s so proud of his mustache, the count, that I ended up with my bathroom awash with different mustache products: waxes and oils and trimming scissors,” he says. “There’s a whole subculture now of gentlemen’s facial-hair products—and I had them all.”

That cosmetic commitment only scratches the surface of McGregor’s buoyant, spiffy embodiment of the count in the limited-series adaptation of A Gentleman in Moscow (premiering March 29 on Paramount+ With Showtime), which mounts Amor Towles’s novel on an expansive, sumptuous scale. His performance represents the primary appeal of the show—adapted by Ben Vanstone (The Last Kingdom) and largely directed by Emmy nominee Sam Miller (I May Destroy You)—in vividly capturing the original story’s spirit, a layered historical drama fashioned as an enchanting fairy tale. “We go to some very serious places, as the novel does, but also we allow ourselves to enjoy the lightness and joy of life,” Vanstone says. “This isn’t a period show. For us, it’s more magical than that.”

The drama begins in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, with the count—a proud aristocrat—having just returned to Russia following an extensive stay in Paris. He’s arrested by the new Soviet regime as a “former person,” or signal of the old world, but is spared death due to his complex past affiliations. Instead, he’s put under house arrest in Moscow’s grand Hotel Metropol, where he’s to live out his days in a shabby attic room. If he ventures beyond the hotel’s walls, he’ll be shot and killed—and so inside he stays, dining and grooming and sleeping and chatting away with anyone and everyone in his vicinity. We jump back and forth in time, receiving flashes of the count’s painful past while hurtling decades into the tumultuous future. The Metropol feels mythic and cozy and mysterious all at once—a little Grand Budapest Hotel, a little Eloise—while the country surrounding it transforms.

When reading A Gentleman in Moscow, one gets the sense that the Metropol never runs out of rooms. Same goes for the show: In the opening scenes alone, we’re treated to glimpses of the count dining in the hotel’s restaurants, exploring the lobby’s nooks, stumbling upon some strange, small, secret detail. “Most shows where the majority of it takes place in one location, by a few episodes in, you might feel like you’ve seen everything,” Vanstone says. “But with this place, it’s labyrinthine.”

The production crew initially went on a search for the perfect building to stand in for the Metropol; it turned out no such building existed. “The only way to do it justice was to build it ourselves,” Vanstone says. The final set, designed by production designer Victor Molero (Now & Then), intertwines real spaces with original sets—a deliberate architectural illusion where, as Vanstone describes it, “you wouldn’t necessarily know which is which.” Together, a crucial character comes to life. You’ve got the lobby, with its vast atriums and curious passageways; the restaurants, which become increasingly pivotal locations; and the attic space, exactingly rendered according to the book’s specifications, with some fresh flourishes thrown in too.

All of this detail finds appropriate emphasis in Miller’s vision behind the camera. The director, known for gritty and impressionistic work on Luther and I May Destroy You, might seem to be an odd fit for this relatively luxurious, warmhearted production, but he brings a bracing energy to Towles’s fable-like world. (Miller directs the bulk of the episodes, with The Witcher’s Sarah O’Gorman helming a few as well.) “Sam very much set the bar at the beginning with a modern, aggressive camera, which is not quite what we would’ve expected,” McGregor says.

Miller was a big draw for the actor, who’s particularly a fan of I May Destroy You, in the first place. McGregor has starred in several limited series at this point, including the third installment of FX’s Fargo, but that show used multiple directors, something that McGregor says is not his “favorite thing”; Halston (for which the actor won an Emmy) and Obi-Wan Kenobi were each helmed by a single filmmaker. “It’s an important relationship,” McGregor says.

During rehearsal, Miller also brought in a movement coach, a key figure in McGregor’s delicate but rigorous physical performance. “We did these extreme exercises of being very, very old and then very young, and thinking about our characters in different stages of their life,” he says. “I spent a lot of time, in his countly days at the beginning, being very upright in his amazing clothes and the way he moves. As I get older, all of that drops away and it becomes more loose—and so in a way, he de-ages physically.” Being able to shoot roughly chronologically allowed McGregor to sink deeper and deeper into the part. He didn’t initially realize the root of his profound investment in both the role and the story’s unique portrait of fatherhood. “In a loose way, he adopts somebody—and I am close to that,” he says. “I have an adopted daughter, and I almost didn’t notice the similarities until we were shooting it…. I felt very, very connected to the count.”

Another development deeper into filming: the romantic arc between the count and Anna, played by McGregor and Winstead—who are married in real life. In one early scene, Anna chides the count for tidying her room without permission—and snubs him for literal years. “To be in love and married to somebody, and then to get to play all those cold shoulder scenes, was just hilarious,” McGregor says. Near the shoot’s end, as the relationship took a tragic turn, the pair found the emotional intensity of their scenes following them home. “You just have to see what she’s done with this role—she’s such a brilliant actor, and the way Anna ages is absolutely heartbreaking at the end,” McGregor says. “We have a scene where we have to part, and we just were an absolute mess [after filming].”

Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair