As a father himself, what captivated McGregor was the kind of man he would be portraying in Big Fish. “When Edward Bloom looks back over his life, he should be very pleased with what he achieved. He always loved his wife. He was good at basketball and baseball and fishing. He was a good circus employee, a good salesman, a really good soldier. And he rebuilt a whole town just for the sake of the citizens who live there. He is one helluva guy.”
To find the right actor to play Bloom in his later years, Zanuck says that a picture proved to be worth a thousand words. “In 1997, a magazine published side-byside photos of Ewan and Albert Finney from 1963 when he starred in Tom Jones. He was about the same age as Ewan then. The resemblance was remarkable.”
“There it was, the same smile, the same dimple, the same sparkle in the eyes,” continues Cohen. “They looked eerily and brilliantly alike.”
Finney’s illustrious 40-year career, has included not only playing Tom Jones in the Oscar® winning film of the same name, but more recently portraying American attorney Ed Masry in Erin Brockovich, for which he was Oscar® nominated as Best Supporting Actor and Winston Churchill in HBO’s “The Gathering Storm,” for which he won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award.
Finney was captivated by Bloom. “The story for me contained all sorts of possibilities. There was all that wonderful, magic stuff, the kind of material that Tim does so well. Not only is he a wonderfully visual director, but he has a facility and ease with actors. It’s an ideal combination.”
In taking on the role of Bloom, Finney found a through line between the character’s journey and his life as a performer on stage and screen. “I’m very sort of earth bound as a person. I tend to look at what’s real, what’s logical. But through drama, I’m somehow allowed to go into fantasy, into a strange other world, to fly a little bit.”
Though they have no scenes together – for obvious reasons – off screen McGregor and Finney became fast friends. “I recall being blown away that I was actually going to meet Albert Finney,” confides McGregor. “The idea of playing him was almost overwhelming because he’s such a legend. Despite the fact that we have no scenes together, I spent as much time as I could around him. He loves acting still, and I like that because I do as well. So it was reassuring to see that after all these years he still has that passion.”
Finney, who shot his scenes first, recalls “We each had a scene where we were fishing in the river. So I said to Tim, ‘Better get Ewan here because he’ll have to do this too.’ So he did. Ewan had been doing a bit of fishing in Alabama, so I asked him, ‘How do we cast?’ And he showed me. I tried it and, well, it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Fortunately, the rest of the time, my work came first so he had to follow my lead,” Finney laughs.
Fortune also smiled on the filmmakers in the casting of the beautiful and loyal Sandra, the woman for whom time literally stands still for Edward. Sandra is portrayed by Jessica Lange (two-time Oscar® winner for Blue Sky and Tootsie) and the young Alison Lohman (who wowed critics in her starring role in White Oleander, which earned her ShoWest’s “Newcomer of the Year” citation).
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