SECRET ’STACHE McGregor tries to outdo Matt Damon’s Informant! facial hair.

In making a film about a military sect whose members referred to themselves as “Jedi,” director Grant Heslov (coscreenwriter of Good Night, and Good Luck) took a logical step: He got young Obi-Wan to play a part.

“I would hope that they didn’t cast me just purely for that link,” Ewan McGregor told us in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Grant claims not to have thought about it before we had our first meeting. I asked him at that point, ‘Does it bother you, the idea that the Jedi are discussed so much in the film and that I am one?’”

Well, he’s not very Jedi-like in the film, but he is a fantasy figure. Although The Men Who Stare at Goats is based on Welsh writer Jon Ronson’s best-seller, McGregor’s character, Bob Wilton, is a fictionalized American journalist who, like Ronson, learns about the supposed existence of the First Earth Battalion, an American military division that experimented with psychic warfare. (The title refers to the group’s alleged attempts to kill goats through telepathy.) Wilton’s guide is an eccentric First Earth alum named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who may or may not have a few screws loose.

“I suppose the idea of it originally was to try and wage war in a different way, and the guy who set it up was trying to find New Age and peaceful tactics in terms of waging war, which would result in people not dying,” McGregor says. “That was a very valiant cause. Then what happened to some of it is that it ended up being used for torture tactics and things like that, which the filmmakers and the writers kind of nod to at the end. That something kind of beautiful is being used for something that’s really not.”

But for McGregor, doing Goats wasn’t a way of being political—he just thought it was a quality script. It also provided the opportunity to work with actors like Clooney and Jeff Bridges, who plays Bill Django, the movie’s amusingly uninhibited version of the creator of the First Earth Battalion.

Despite its Iraq setting, McGregor points out that Goats isn’t even a particularly topical film. “The backdrop of the movie is that they are traveling through Iraq,” McGregor says. “It’s the beginning of the war in the movie. My character goes over there to try and become embedded with a troop and prove himself as a man after he’s been humiliated and emasculated by his wife leaving him for the one-armed editor, Dave. But it’s not a film about the Iraq War. I’ve always read it to be such that it’s a film about that secret organization.”

Indeed, Goats often seems like a film that doesn’t know what it’s about, lurching from farce to suspense in a manner that recalls Three Kings, but with a bizarre sense of comic timing. McGregor is the straight man, which in this context may be the more difficult part. He has to stand back and ask questions, while the wackier supporting roles permit McGregor’s costars to cut loose.

“My first question to Grant was about that,” McGregor explains. “I said I see him very much as the straight guy and ’round about him are these incredibly colorful characters—Lyn Cassady, Bill Django, Kevin Spacey’s character—they’re all quite clear and well-defined. And he reassured me, said that he’d never thought of it that way and that he felt that Bob had a real arc to his character, because he starts as a broken man. And by the end of it, has learned something and found a bit of passion and belief in something.”

Maybe that’s what the film’s about.

The Men Who Stare at Goats opens Friday 6.

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