Clara McGregor Was Born To Do This

Clara McGregor knows how it sounds: When she was a little girl, she dreamed of going to Hollywood to become… a producer. Only she didn’t realize it until she was much older. The daughter of actor Ewan McGregor and production designer Eve Mavrakis, she grew up with a lot of free time on movie sets and was drawn to the behind-the-scenes action. “As a kid, you just sit and observe,” McGregor says. “I’d see everyone sitting by the monitors and wait to see if there was a little headset free and sneak in and get a view. I saw how every single person on that set is so essential to getting it all done and how there are so many moving parts that somehow all come together to create something.”

In the U.K., where she spent her formative years, “there was less of an assumption that I was going to become an actor,” the 28-year-old says. “Then I moved to L.A. [at 13], and everyone was like, ‘Oh, you’re going to do what your dad did.’ I loved photography, so my line was like, ‘I’m going to be behind the camera.’” The interest led her to New York University, where she graduated in 2017 with a degree in cinema studies. McGregor stayed in New York for a while, working odd jobs and auditioning for roles she found on Backstage.com, as well as dabbling in modeling.

Now, she’s settled somewhere in the industry in-between — as an actor, known for indie films and shows like American Horror Story, and a producer, co-founding the company Deux Dames alongside friend Vera Bulder. Deux Dames’ first feature film, 2023’s Bleeding Love, premiered at South by Southwest. McGregor and Bulder wrote it, and McGregor starred in it alongside Ewan. Working with her dad, though, was not an entirely sentimental choice. “Casting my dad as my dad, to be very real about it, that made it way easier to get that to keep [it] going, because we had an A-list actor on every page,” she says. “Other projects when I don’t hire my dad, those take longer.” The experience crystallized exactly what she loves about producing: “Putting all the puzzle pieces together and putting out the fires.”

We’re chatting just a few days into the new year, and McGregor — if you believe that how you spend New Year’s Eve determines how you’ll spend the year — is poised to be booked and busy. “I did party hop a little bit, which is so unlike me,” she says. “The past few New Year’s, I’ve done the most quiet, chill stuff — like camping.”

The day of our chat, she’d just received the first draft of Deux Dames’ next project, a biopic of French opera legend Julie d’Aubigny. How’s this for a logline: “[She was a] cross-dressing, bisexual, opera-singing, sword-fighting woman that lived in the 17th century and broke her girlfriend out of a nunnery and burnt it to the ground,” McGregor says. “She would slay men in sword fights and have to live on the run and was pardoned by the King of France. Crazy life.” She’s got the funding for it and plans to shoot in France sometime this year. Will she be in it? “We will never get in the way of a project getting made,” she says of her and Bulder, “but there’s so many parts in this, and we’re both actresses so, whenever we can, we do.”

“[I love] putting all the puzzle pieces together and putting out the fires.”

This spring, she’ll head to Cyprus to begin production on Noon, a dramatic thriller from French director Xavier Palud, in which she’ll be the lead. But what McGregor really wants to do next is comedy. “I want to lighten it up a bit,” she says. “When you write, when you produce, when you act, you do dive into these characters and into that world.” So she’s been studying the greats recently, watching old Peter Sellers movies as well as reading newer scripts from shows like Girls and Fleabag. “I rewatched The House Bunny last night, which is so great,” she says. “I hadn’t watched it in years. Anna Faris is amazing in it. It has that raunchy humor that [now] someone like Rachel Sennott has really nailed. It was allowing women to have the same kind of humor as men, because we do.”

“Other projects when I don’t hire my dad, those take longer.”

Even when she’s watching something for pleasure, it can be hard to turn off her producer brain. “As a kid, every scene or every movie I’d watch, I’d watch the scene, but I’d be wondering where the crew was standing. That’s gotten better. I can let myself exist in it,” she says. She points to her latest fixation: Babygirl, which happens to star her younger sister Esther as the teenage daughter of Nicole Kidman — Ewan’s old Moulin Rouge! buddy. “I’ve seen it four times now. [Esther is] so amazing. She’s so powerful in her moments; she’s totally unforgettable. And seeing her with Nicole was so special and sweet and full circle in a way. But yeah, I can definitely lose myself in a movie.”

And at the end of the day, that’s all she wants to do. “I want to be as busy as I can be this year. I want to be working every single day. People often ask me: ‘What’s your dream movie?’ Or: ‘What’s your dream job as an actor?’ and I’m like, ‘To be filming on set and know my next movie that I’m shooting again really soon after.’ That’s a dream.”

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