Mary Elizabeth Winstead on marriage to Ewan McGregor and the dark side of Hollywood: ‘If I wasn’t flirting enough, they’d say I was cold’

In 2006, Mary Elizabeth Winstead – later of the eye-popping action comedy Scott Pilgrim vs the World – was asked to audition for a Quentin Tarantino movie. Every young female actor in Hollywood wanted one of the parts in the film, a B-movie pastiche called Death Proof. A specific dress code was also in place: meet the director while wearing short-shorts, tank tops and flip-flops. Writing in her 2018 memoir, the Girls5Eva actor Busy Philipps recalled sitting among “a waiting room of scantily clad clones”. Winstead was one of them, and did end up getting a role in the film. She loved working with the Pulp Fiction auteur. She has nothing but praise for him even to this day. But still…

“If that were to come to me now, I’d be like… ‘What?’” Winstead laughs, momentarily breaking her poise with a grimace. “At the time, it was just like… ‘OK! Flip-flops, check! Better get a pedicure, check!’ I didn’t question it at all. I was just so desperate to get a foot in the door.” (I don’t think the pun was intended.) Today, nearly two decades later and with a list of nicely idiosyncratic film and television credits to her name, the 39-year-old just wishes her younger self hadn’t taken the entertainment industry so seriously. “It’s not rocket science. We’re not curing cancer. We’re just trying to make movies. I didn’t need to feel like the most important thing in my life was making sure I had a pedicure that day.”

In her new Paramount+ series A Gentleman in Moscow, based on Amor Towles’s bestselling novel, Winstead plays the kind of movie star who never got to have an epiphany like that – someone whose acting career is, and always will be, at the mercy of powerful men. Granted, it’s a very different world that the glamorous but scrambling Anna Urbanova occupies – we meet her in early 20th-century Russia, a resident in an opulent hotel alongside an exiled aristocrat (Winstead’s real-life husband Ewan McGregor) under perpetual house arrest. The pair flirt, fight and fall in love. As the decades pass by, against the rise and fall of Stalin, Anna transforms, shedding as much as she can of the woman she was expected to be.

“The makeup and the heels and the hair,” Winstead lists off, wearily. “This image of what you think you’re supposed to be for this male fantasy. It’s like layer upon layer of artifice, and that’s an incredibly hard thing to keep up over time.”

For Winstead herself, it wasn’t until her early thirties that she was able to, in her words, “say screw it”. It’s partly why she’s never been as massive as she probably could be, her career always a bit of a dance between personal wants and Hollywood expectations. Depressingly, most of the media ink spilled about her – and particularly in the UK – has been related to her marriage, eclipsing a lot of great work in the process.

Video-calling from New York, she is calm and professional, with a rich alto voice. These are qualities she’s had since the beginning of her career – an instinctive self-possession that has made it tricky to put her in any particular box, as much as the industry has tried. Today she’s dressed in a black gown, her chestnut hair cut into a messy bob.

Horror fans adore her for her run of teen slashers in the mid-Noughties – dicing with death in Final Destination 3, not quite dicing with death in Black Christmas – while she was cosplayer catnip as the pink-haired dreamgirl Ramona Flowers in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim. But she’s always seemed more at home with the gnarlier stuff, parts that leave her with a little dirt under her fingernails. She is heartbreaking as an alcoholic teacher in the 2012 indie Smashed, tough and sturdy in the JJ Abrams-produced sci-fi thriller 10 Cloverfield Lane. After years of resisting superhero movies, she lent sharp, icy muscularity to the role of Huntress in the Harley Quinn spin-off film Birds of Prey. “I’ve never got excited about being the girlfriend or being the love interest in a film, or just batting my eyes,” she says.

Winstead has been acting since she was a child, starting out in local theatre in Utah, followed by soap operas in Los Angeles. Work came quickly once she hit the end of her teens – she was a superpowered villain in the Disney comedy Sky High, then Bruce Willis’s daughter in two of the later Die Hards. Her films back then had big budgets and lots of eyeballs on them, but she remembers the culture of the era being tricky to navigate.

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“It was a very lonely and confusing time to be young and starting out in this industry,” she says. “I had many instances of going into a meeting and if I wasn’t smiley enough or coyly flirting enough – they’d say I was cold. There was that undercurrent of, ‘She didn’t flirt with me, so I didn’t like her.’ That happened all throughout my twenties.”

And whenever it did, she tended to blame herself. “I only had a couple of friends who were actresses, and we never talked about these things. And you need to be able to talk about something with somebody else to understand that, ‘Oh, wait, this actually isn’t right – there’s something uncomfortable about this.’ Otherwise you just think it’s normal, that you have to toe the line because no one else is saying anything about it. You accept the status quo.”

She credits Smashed with transforming her career, and helping her let go of the anxiety drilled into her as a young actor. “In those days, we were all looking at box office numbers and only doing films and not TV or streaming,” she says. “It feels like the power of that has been taken away now.”

Adding to that sense of calm is the fact that many of her most high-profile movies – specifically Scott Pilgrim and Birds of Prey – were box office disappointments upon release, only to develop rabid fanbases later on. Stuff balances out. “I’ve never had a good sense of picking projects that make money,” she laughs. “That’s just never been how my brain works.”

The aborted Birds of Prey franchise, which saw Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn team up with a gang of female heroes (including Jurnee Smollet-Bell’s Black Canary and Rosie Perez’s Renee Montoya), was a particular disappointment. “I love that film, even if it’s polarising. It’s got people who love it, and people who didn’t love it so much. And it wasn’t a flop by any means, but I think it also wasn’t quite enough of a success to keep on with it.”

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She was under contract to play Huntress in multiple sequels, but she doesn’t think any will now be made. “Which is unfortunate, because I loved playing her. But I was really thankful that I got to do something left of centre in the superhero world. We got to be a bit weird. But that also sort of explains why my movies don’t make money, because I tend to choose the weird ones.”

In recent years, Winstead has found more of a home in TV limited series – she was one of those alien warriors with luminous green head-tails in the Star Wars show Ahsoka, and a tricksy femme fatale in the third season of Fargo. It was on the set of Fargo that she met McGregor. They had a son together, Laurie, in 2021 and married in 2022.

A Gentleman in Moscow came to McGregor first, and Winstead read a few of the scripts out of curiosity. But she fell in love with its scale and ambition – “It felt like a sweeping epic that we don’t see much of any more, like doing Doctor Zhivago or something.” It is indeed incredibly elegant, full of snowy banks, opulent staircases and fur coats. Winstead and McGregor have fantastic chemistry, too – the former bawdy, spry and sexually confident, the latter seeming to melt in her presence.

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Neither of them had reservations about working together again (both are in Birds of Prey, too), or doing joint interviews to promote the show. “I know there are couples who wouldn’t do that, but I think because we met working together, [acting] is such a foundation of what we love about one another,” she says. “I’ve never had so much fun in a scene as when I’m in a scene with Ewan, so I don’t think we could pass up an opportunity like this. When the roles are right, and the project’s right, it’s a no-brainer.”

Plus, you get the sense that Anna helped her exorcise some of her demons from her early career. Winstead comes most alive when she speaks of the character, a glint of deep admiration in her eyes. “I’ve always loved playing characters like her, who are thinking about what to do, how to get to the next day, how to keep the job and stay afloat and sometimes literally stay alive.”

She breaks into a smile, satisfied.

“I’m inspired by the survivor in her.”

‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ is streaming on Paramount+, with new episodes dropping on Fridays