It was a whirlwind time. Trainspotting had made him an international star, but he still felt like one of us. We were ’90s kids and he was our poster boy, a hero plucked from the crowd to represent our excitements and fears about the coming millennium. In his early 20s, he’d shared a London flat with Jude Law and his Trainspotting co-star Jonny Lee Miller, who was dating Angelina Jolie at the time. Thankfully, smartphones hadn’t been invented yet.

Pouring hot water from the kettle, McGregor recalls: “My brother was two years older than me, and he was in the Royal Air Force. But he was living with me and Jude and Jonny and occasionally Angelina. For six months, he had to work in the Intelligence Department. He’d come back in his suit from the war office to this, like, chaos. He worked for the Ministry of Defence! He shouldn’t have been around some of the things….”

“Like what?” I ask with a smile. “Drugs?”

“Well, things like that, you know—It was pretty hectic in there.”

McGregor was still drinking then, still getting himself into trouble. He and his then wife famously conceived their first child while filming Trainspotting (“Made in Scotland!” McGregor once said), and the film ignited his career. He was young and hot and wildly brash, memorably talking shit about Hugh Grant’s acting in the press and calling David Letterman “arrogant and uninteresting.”

McGregor got sober not long after. And he’s been clean for two decades. His sobriety is, in part, what drew him to this month’s Doctor Sleep. The film (and the Stephen King book it’s based on) picks up 30 years after the events of The Shining, or 30 years after the Overlook Hotel was destroyed. McGregor stars as the grown-up Danny Torrance—Jack Nicholson’s son in the film, and the boy who cried, “Redrum.” When the story opens, Danny (now Dan) is a drunk who abuses alcohol to keep the literal ghosts at bay. He gets sober only after waking up next to a woman with a beer gut and a toddler—a kid who reaches for a pile of Mommy’s cocaine, calling it “canny.”