Some actors chase reinvention. Ewan McGregor has made a career out of quiet evolution. Three decades after breaking out as a scrappy antihero and two decades after becoming a galaxy-spanning icon, the 53-year-old Scottish actor is being celebrated not for spectacle, but for restraint—earning some of the strongest reviews of his career for A Gentleman in Moscow.

Ewan McGregor has spent three decades proving that longevity in Hollywood doesn’t have to mean playing it safe. At 53, the Scottish actor is enjoying one of the most praised performances of his career in Paramount+’s A Gentleman in Moscow—and the industry is taking note.

McGregor, who also produced on the limited series, has been named the recipient of the Newport Beach Film Festival’s TV Performance of the Year Award. The honor recognizes his turn as an aristocrat condemned by a Bolshevik tribunal to a lifetime of house arrest inside a grand hotel—an elegant premise that McGregor transforms into a meditation on time, dignity, and quiet resistance.

He will be celebrated Tuesday, Oct. 22, at the Pelican Hill Resort in Newport Beach, where festivities begin at 5:30 p.m. PT. The evening will open with a career-spanning conversation between McGregor and yours truly, recorded for a future episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, followed by the presentation of the award.

“The Newport Beach Film Festival could not be more honored to bestow this award to Ewan McGregor for his legendary career,” said festival CEO and executive director Gregg Schwenk. “He is a true powerhouse who has left a mark not only on audiences, but on the industry as a whole.”

That career arc has been anything but predictable. McGregor first grabbed attention in 1995’s Trainspotting, then became a global icon as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (1999–2005). Along the way, he showcased musical bravado in Moulin Rouge!, gravitas in The Ghost Writer, and emotional restraint in The Impossible. In 2021, he added both an Emmy and a Golden Globe to his résumé for Halston.

A Gentleman in Moscow, which premiered in May, adapts Amor Towles’ 2016 novel and places McGregor at its refined, resilient center. It’s a performance defined less by spectacle than by accumulation—proof that some of the most powerful acting happens over years, not moments.The 25th Newport Beach Film Festival runs Oct. 17–24, 2024. Peter Sarsgaard will receive the Film Performance of the Year Award for September 5 and also record a live episode of Awards Chatter.

This year’s slate of honorees also includes Nicolas Cage (Icon Award), Joan Chen (Career Achievement Award), Colman Domingo (Maverick Award), Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Sheryl Lee Ralph (Artist of Distinction Awards), George MacKay (Spotlight Award), June Squibb (Lifetime Achievement Award), Diane Warren (Lifetime Achievement in Music), Colleen Atwood (Career Achievement in Costume Design), David Alan Grier and Wendi McLendon-Covey (Outstanding Achievement in Comedy), Terry Crews (Arts Champion Award), Jane Lynch (Outstanding Achievement in Comedy), Finneas O’Connell (Outstanding Achievement in Music, Oct. 21), and Christoph Waltz (Icon Award).