When Clara McGregor approached her father with a movie idea, Ewan McGregor heard a few words that made him nervous.

She was “writing a film about us.”

Their relationship had already been through years of anger after Ewan separated from Clara’s mother, Eve Mavrakis. Now Clara wanted him to play the father of an estranged daughter in a story she had helped create.

Ewan agreed.

What followed put the two of them inside a fictional version of something they hadn’t fully repaired in real life.

Ewan, 55, and Clara, 30, starred together in the 2024 film Bleeding Love. Speaking about the movie at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the actor became emotional while recalling how closely parts of the story touched their own relationship.

Their Family Had Been Through a Painful Split

The distance between father and daughter had grown out of a difficult period for the McGregor family.

Ewan separated from Mavrakis in 2017 after more than two decades of marriage. The former couple share four daughters: Clara, Jamyan, Esther and Anouk.

His relationship with actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead became public around that period. The two had worked together on Fargo, and photographs of them kissing appeared before news of Ewan’s separation had been announced.

Clara didn’t hide how she felt.

In 2018, she drew attention for a since-deleted Instagram comment in which she insulted Winstead. Years later, Ewan looked back on that period without trying to minimize what his daughter had felt.

“It was a very painful time,” he said at the Edinburgh festival.

His children had been hurt, he said, and Clara in particular had made her feelings known.

Ewan eventually married Winstead in 2022. They now share a son, Laurie.

By then, his relationship with Clara had begun moving somewhere else.

Then Clara Asked Him to Play Her Father

The project that became Bleeding Love gave the two a strange assignment.

Clara co-wrote the film and starred as a young woman traveling through the desert with her estranged father, played by Ewan. The characters are trying to reconnect after years of distance.

For Ewan, the premise immediately felt close.

He told the Edinburgh audience that he had been “really scared” when Clara first approached him because he feared the script would simply put their private family history onscreen.

That wasn’t exactly what she had written.

“It was about the reparation of a relationship between a father and daughter that hadn’t fully happened between us,” Ewan said.

He stressed that the movie wasn’t a direct autobiography. Still, he acknowledged that “massive elements” of the father-daughter story overlapped with their own experience.

That meant some scenes carried more than scripted tension.

One in particular stayed with him.

One Scene Gave Clara Space to Let Her Anger Out

At one point in the movie, Clara’s character confronts her father.

Ewan described it as an “incredible, brilliant moment” in which she fully tells the character what she thinks of him.

But while filming it, something else was happening.

According to Ewan, Clara was also able to express feelings that belonged to their real relationship.

For a father who knew how angry his daughter had once been, that mattered.

Ewan said Clara had been “very hurt and angry” after his separation from her mother. Looking back now, he said he felt grateful that she hadn’t kept those feelings hidden.

“She was very open with me, very vocal with me, and expressed her anger very well,” he said.

The film didn’t erase the years that came before it. Nor did Ewan present the production as a simple recreation of their family history.

What it offered was time together.

Father and daughter had to show up on the same set, work through scenes side by side and tell a story about two people who had once stopped knowing how to reach one another.

Ewan later described that shared work as “a very important part” of repairing their own relationship.

Clara Remembered the Time Together Differently

For Clara, making the movie also meant having something adults rarely get with their parents: long, uninterrupted stretches of time.

Speaking to PEOPLE in 2024, she called working with her father an “incredible experience.”

“It’s rare as an adult that you get to spend that amount of time with your parents,” she said.

The project also let her see Ewan in a role she had known from the outside for her entire life.

Clara said she had always admired him as an actor. Working opposite him gave her a close look at the skill she had watched from a distance.

“Getting to act with him showed me how good he is at what he does,” she told PEOPLE.

By the time Bleeding Love reached audiences, the father and daughter who appeared onscreen were in a different place than the pair whose anger had helped inspire parts of the story.

They had made amends.

Ewan could now talk about Clara’s anger with gratitude rather than defensiveness. Clara could talk about the film as time with her father that she valued.

The fiction had been about an estranged father and daughter trying to repair what had broken between them.

For Ewan and Clara, the work of playing those people became part of their own repair.

Years after Clara had publicly shown how hurt she was, Ewan stood in Edinburgh and spoke with emotion about the fact that she had never hidden it from him.

“I’m very grateful for it now,” he said.