Esther McGregor was certain she had blown her audition for Pedro Almodóvar’s highly anticipated English-language debut, “The Room Next Door.”
Shooting a short film at the time (as a favor) and never feeling too hot about it, the hyper-creative and delightfully energetic actress, model, musician, and tattoo artist (and shameless “Nepo Child” — more on that later) wasn’t really paying attention to the assignments she’d been asked to record. So she gave the lines she’d been sent a quick read — perhaps not with the same care and focus she’d normally need — and emailed the recording over.
“And maybe two minutes after I sent the tape, I went back and checked it, and I saw Almodóvar’s title, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I screwed up, I screwed up my alternative! ‘” she explains, speaking from Nova Scotia during an unusual period of work-free time due to filming the upcoming Amazon miniseries, “You’re Liars.”
Almodóvar is clearly the kind of auteur director any actor should want to work with at any stage of their career. Yet for McGregor, a self-confessed “world cinema geek,” he was a filmmaker she absolutely adored, studied passionately in class and whose library she had visited “with awe” over and over again. “I used to get so, so, so upset with myself.”
Fortunately, such disappointment was not justified. About three months later, at the end of 2023 — and without any interaction or suggestions — she bought a name saying that the half, during which she appears alongside Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, was hers.
McGregor was actually on the set of another film when she came across it — A24’s “Babygirl,” from “Our Bodies Our Bodies Our Bodies” director Halina Reijn and starring Nicole Kidman and Antonio Banderas. And Banderas, after all, is someone who has known Almodóvar moderately well (eight films together and counting). “So when I told him I bought the part, he was like, ‘No way!’”
Naturally, the two took a quick selfie and sent it to the director.
“It was such a weird experience,” she says. “I didn’t have to do a double take, but a triple take, and I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ And I went back and watched the audition tape and I was like, ‘Hmm, okay!’”
Though she freely admits that her roles in both “Babygirl” and “The Room Next Door” are small, they are two small roles that have given the 22-year-old — just a few years into her acting career — the unusual and prestigious feat of having two films screen in competition at Venice. What’s more, they are two of the most talked-about features premiering at the Lido this year (and each with only scant details, as producers try to keep things under wraps).
“The Room Next Door” — Almodóvar’s first English-language feature — is another comic family drama from the renowned director, this time, according to the restricted notes, about a “very imperfect mother and her resentful daughter” who live separate lives due to a “deep misunderstanding.” (A completely dialogue-free trailer recently released by Sony Footage Classics provided additional plot clues.) “Babygirl,” meanwhile, is a steamy erotic thriller in which Kidman’s powerful CEO begins a piratical affair with a much younger, charismatic intern (played by Harris Dickinson).
For McGregor, who plays Kidman and Banderas’ “dirty” teenage daughter in “Babygirl,” her position had an unusually private component.
“A lot of my personal issues and my personal life that I went through with my family, and the dynamics of that, were weirdly replicated on screen, just in reverse, because I was dealing with my mother instead of my father,” she explains candidly.
Throwing another A-list title into an already heady combination, McGregor’s father is none other than Ewan McGregor. And his character in “Babygirl” is the same age she was when her father had a very public and messy breakup with her mother Eve Mavrakis and began a relationship with — and later married — his “Fargo” co-star Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
“For me, that was the age where you change and realize that your mom and dad are people and they fuck up and make mistakes and make choices that might not be within the realm of curiosity for others,” she notes. “So it was really fascinating to revisit that with a different perspective. I’m 22 now and all that shit with my family happened when I was 16, so with my newfound closure and understanding of my own trajectory, I was able to find a new voice with this character, and I thought that was really special.”
McGregor admits that his relationship with his father had been fractured, and there were years after the family split when they didn’t speak to each other. However, it was actually his first role in a significant production that helped start a therapeutic course.
Though her love of acting came first, and she spent much of her childhood at her father’s studios around the world (“magical places—my Disneyland… even though I hate Disneyland”), it wasn’t until later in life that she really began pursuing it professionally (she says her parents “never let her” act as a child).
An aversion to “being bored” led her to start playing music, first piano and then guitar. During COVID, she started the band French Thyme with fellow musician Leo Main, and though she’s released an EP of her own — largely a buoyant, feel-good electro pop, on which she also sings — she insists that music is solely for her own creativity (“It’s the only factor I have complete control over”).
A passion for art led her to become a tattoo artist, get her license and open a shop with a good friend in New York after she moved from Los Angeles (where her family had moved from the UK when she was 11). It was in New York that she also began modeling professionally (although her first campaign was with her older sister Clara in LA), and was soon doing fashion shoots and catwalks, opening Miu Miu’s spring/summer 2023 show in Milan (having been handpicked by Miuccia Prada). “I do a lot of catwalk modeling, but I’m also 5ft 4in, so I shouldn’t do a lot of catwalk modeling!” she laughs.
However, it wasn’t until all of these callings were already starting to properly bubble up that acting came to the fore, via a random audition request that came while she was in college in New York. The challenge was the Disney+ series “Obi Wan-Kenobi,” which, of course, features her father in the titular role.
“I just thought, I’ll do this, just for fun and see what comes out of it,” she says.
There was a name again. Then director Deborah Chow called (just as she was standing outside her shop about to go into a tattoo session)
“She said, ‘I just need you to realize, I haven’t told your dad this yet, but we’re giving you the part, and I really want you to know it’s not because of your dad,’ which was really sweet of her,” she says. “So I said, ‘Just do me a favor, don’t tell him yet, let’s just tell him.’” Which she did — literally on set.
Adding an additional dimension to the experience, not only do both McGregors appear in the series, but Esther — in a small role in the second episode — plays drug dealer Tetha Grig, who actually tries to promote Obi-Wan Kenobi’s spice (something she says she “tried not to think too deeply about” due to her father’s past battles with addiction).
While it may have only been a brief scene, McGregor says appearing alongside her father for the first time was “a huge step in both of our relationships” and “really helped reignite” issues between them several years after she had taken space to deal with everything that had happened to her family. “But I feel like now I would really like to work with my dad again.”
Which brings us to the topic of “Nepo Infants,” which McGregor says is a badge she wears with pleasure.
“After all, my dad is an actor and I was privileged to have been able to grow up on sets and discover my love for acting at such a young age — I don’t think I would have had it if I hadn’t been around,” she says. However, while having a movie star father is something McGregor acknowledges has “opened doors” and that she “would never take anything for granted” what it has given her, she says it hasn’t led to jobs.
“If I was shit, I would be shit,” she notes. “So I definitely acknowledge that privilege. I don’t think I would take being called Nepo Child lightly. If you want, you can, but I’m not going to let that diminish the exhausting work I put into this. If I had to sit on my ass, I wouldn’t be working right now.”
And dealing with her appearance is all McGregor says she wants to do. While the Nova Scotia TV gig — which doesn’t end until October — means she won’t be able to celebrate “The Room Next Door” or “Babygirl” in Venice, she seems more than happy to continue production. When a castmate told her he was looking forward to a break because he was “so exhausted,” she says her response was, “No! I better go straight to another set!” As she notes, “That’s what keeps my heart beating and keeps me going.”
Her modelling career has taken a back seat (travelling was getting harder and harder anyway), her music is what she takes with her (her guitar is off-camera on our Zoom call) and her tattooing, although she has left her New York shop to her friend to run, has a “really good client base” happy to wait months until she’s free (McGregor also says that most of the film crews she’s worked with are heavily tattooed and expect her to “add something to their canvas”).
But with her still-nascent acting career now starting to take off, McGregor is quite happy to be focused on that alone. And honing her craft by observing them more closely. Whether it’s Almodóvar’s distinctive rehearsal processes (she describes her entire time on “The Room Next Door” as a “gorgeous, gorgeous experience” and being in a “presence of affection and happiness”) or the way Kidman would meditate before scenes in “Babygirl” and then return to the role (a skill she’s been trying to master herself — “I haven’t mastered it yet, but I’ll get there at some point”), she wants to soak it all up.
Interestingly, the only person in particular she says she can’t learn from is her father, at least not yet.
“I should, and I am engaged in it, because there are times like the other day, when I came home from eight solid hours of heavy, heavy material, and I was so depressed that it really got to me, and in that second, I thought I should probably call my dad and ask him what he does in these conditions,” she says. “I really need to do that, but there’s this weird part of my head that says, ‘I need to figure this out on my own,’ and then it’s like, ‘Hey, I figured this out.’ Because it’s such a privilege to have the ability to communicate with someone so close to you and get that kind of insight, it really is, and it’s just my own personal stuff that gets in the way of that.”