"I got married because I fell in love with this woman. I had a baby with her because we wanted to have children. But that's not because of some philosophical ideal at all, no"
About this Quote
Ewan McGregor’s bluntness here is doing a kind of cultural cleanup. He’s pushing back on the expectation that a famous person’s private life must come packaged as a thesis statement: marriage as a manifesto, parenthood as a worldview, romance as a brand. Instead, he insists on the unfashionable idea that life choices can be ordinary, even boring, without being morally suspicious.
The phrasing is telling. “I got married because…” and “I had a baby with her because…” reads like a courtroom defense, as if he’s answering an invisible cross-examiner. That “But” signals the real target: the pressure to retrofit personal decisions into “some philosophical ideal,” the kind of language celebrity interviews often demand. He’s refusing to perform depth on command, refusing to turn intimacy into content.
There’s also a quiet rebuke to both sides of the modern culture-war script. To the romantic idealists, he’s saying: don’t mythologize it. To the cynics, he’s saying: don’t over-intellectualize it. Love and family aren’t being deployed here as proof of virtue or tradition; they’re being framed as lived desire and mutual agreement.
Context matters: McGregor came up in an era when actors were increasingly expected to be socially fluent, politically legible, and personally “intentional” in a public-facing way. His “no” at the end is almost comic in its finality, a door closing on the interview-industrial complex that keeps fishing for an angle. It’s not anti-philosophy so much as anti-pretension: a reminder that not every life choice is a statement, and that’s part of the point.
The phrasing is telling. “I got married because…” and “I had a baby with her because…” reads like a courtroom defense, as if he’s answering an invisible cross-examiner. That “But” signals the real target: the pressure to retrofit personal decisions into “some philosophical ideal,” the kind of language celebrity interviews often demand. He’s refusing to perform depth on command, refusing to turn intimacy into content.
There’s also a quiet rebuke to both sides of the modern culture-war script. To the romantic idealists, he’s saying: don’t mythologize it. To the cynics, he’s saying: don’t over-intellectualize it. Love and family aren’t being deployed here as proof of virtue or tradition; they’re being framed as lived desire and mutual agreement.
Context matters: McGregor came up in an era when actors were increasingly expected to be socially fluent, politically legible, and personally “intentional” in a public-facing way. His “no” at the end is almost comic in its finality, a door closing on the interview-industrial complex that keeps fishing for an angle. It’s not anti-philosophy so much as anti-pretension: a reminder that not every life choice is a statement, and that’s part of the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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