Ewan McGregor has spoken about mending his relationship with daughter Clara, 30, after the pair clashed following his divorce from first wife Eve Mavrakis in 2020.

The Trainspotting actor, who shares four daughters with Mavrakis, split from his wife of 22 years in 2017. He began a relationship with Fargo co-star Mary Elizabeth Winstead the same year. After finalising his divorce from Mavrakis three years later, McGregor welcomed a son with Winstead before marrying her in 2022.

McGregor, 55, has now opened up about how his divorce impacted his family, revealing that his eldest daughter Clara was “very hurt” at the time.

However, they managed to work things out while working on the 2023 film Bleeding Love, which Clara had asked her father to star in with her.

“It was about the reparation of a relationship between a father and daughter that hadn’t fully happened between us,” McGregor said at the Edinburgh Film Festival on Friday (14 August). “It was a very important part of that for me and her by being on set together and telling a story about an estranged daughter. Not biographical but massive elements that are.”

He added that in one scene, Clara’s character “fully lets her dad have it” and “really tells him what she thinks of him”, which allowed her to vent in real life.

Speaking about his divorce from Mavrakis, he continued: “It was a very painful time. My children were very hurt, Clara was very hurt and Clara was – I’m very grateful for it now – but she was very open with me, very vocal with me, and expressed her anger very well.”

While the film was written by Ruby Caster, the original story – which follows a father as he drives his estranged daughter to a rehab clinic after she overdoses, having started a new family elsewhere – was conceived partly by Clara McGregor.

The London-born actor said in 2019 that she had struggled with substance abuse and anxiety in the past, having become reliant on the prescription drug Xanax.

The year before, she made her feelings known about her father’s new relationship with Winstead, calling her “a piece of trash” online. Commenting on a post by a fan account of the 41-year-old Birds of Prey star, Clara wrote: “Most beautiful and talented woman on earth? Oh man y’all are delusional. The girl is a piece of trash.”

She later said she regretted making the comment, telling The Times later the same year: “It wasn’t the most mature way to go about things, but I was angry and upset.

“There had been a lot building up to it and a lot to deal with – not to make excuses or anything – but, yeah, it wasn’t my finest moment.”

Also at the Edinburgh Film Festival, McGregor reflected on the negative critical response to his trilogy of Star Wars films, having played the role of a young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the prequels from 1999 until 2005.

“I did them, and I enjoyed them, and they were not well received,” he said. “And so that was weird and hard – to sort of put yourself into something like that, and then for them to be really dragged through the mud by the critics. But I learnt a lot about not giving a s***.”