For Fans of Ewan McGregor

Every McGregor performance since 1996 gets measured against Mark Renton, and that is not unfair. Danny Boyle and Irvine Welsh gave him a character who is both utterly despicable and heartbreakingly human, and McGregor played every note without flinching. The famous toilet scene alone contains more acting than most careers. T2 Trainspotting (2017) is the rare sequel that earns its existence, partly because McGregor is twenty years older and sadder in exactly the right ways.

Baz Luhrmann's jukebox spectacle could have been an embarrassment, and for anyone who did not trust Ewan McGregor to sell it, it briefly looks like one. Then he opens his mouth on a Paris rooftop and sings 'Come What May' and the whole baroque machine clicks into place. His willingness to be genuinely vulnerable in a rhinestone fever dream is what makes the film work. It freed a generation of musicals to take themselves seriously.

Playing identical twins with opposite moral compasses in Noah Hawley's third Fargo season, McGregor delivered two fully separate performances that never felt like a stunt. Emmit Stussy is charming and weak. Ray Stussy is desperate and resentful. Both are real. The seams never show. Critics and audiences were distracted by a crowded prestige-TV landscape in 2017, but this is some of the most technically demanding work of his career.

The Obi-Wan Kenobi series was never going to be everyone's favorite Star Wars property, but what McGregor did with the role was personal. He played a man broken by failure and quietly rebuilding his purpose, and he played it with a restraint the franchise rarely allows. After two decades as 'the prequel Obi-Wan,' he finally got to give the character weight. Fans of McGregor specifically, rather than fans of Star Wars generally, found the series quietly moving.