How ‘American Pastoral’ Fell into Ewan McGregor’s Hands

This weekend, American Pastoral hits theaters. The crime drama, based on the 1997 novel of the same name by Philip Roth, stars Ewan McGregor and also marks his directorial debut. In an interview with BackstageOL’s Dave Morales, the actor revealed what attracted him to the film and how he heard about it.

“I was shooting this pilot [for HBO], and I got given the script for American Pastoral from my agent, and I just fell for it. I fell for it very hard…at first it was the story about the father and the daughter,” he said. “I’ve got four girls myself so I know very much what that relationship is all about, and it just broke my heart. I was reading about this dad who loses, you know in the ‘60s, loses his daughter to a political, sort of radical political group, and she becomes radicalized and she ends up doing a terrorist act and he loses her. She disappears…she goes underground and he doesn’t know where she is.”

Check out the film’s official synopsis below:

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Philip Roth novel, AMERICAN PASTORAL follows a family whose seemingly idyllic existence is shattered by the social and political turmoil of the 1960s. Ewan McGregor (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Beginners) makes his directorial debut and stars as Seymour “Swede” Levov, a once legendary high school athlete who is now a successful businessman married to Dawn, a former beauty queen. But turmoil brews beneath the polished veneer of Swede’s life. When his beloved teenage daughter, Merry, disappears after being accused of committing a violent act, Swede dedicates himself to finding her and reuniting his family. What he discovers shakes him to the core, forcing him to look beneath the surface and confront the chaos that is shaping the world around him.

Watch the interview below: