ROME -- The man who plays the interim pope, Il Camerlengo, in the movie of Dan Brown's Angels & Demons, has been to exactly one Catholic mass in his life.

"There was no religion in my family," Ewan McGregor says. "I've been at one Catholic christening."

And though he says, "I'm passionate about a lot of things, religion isn't one of them.

"So we had a Catholic priest from New York City, Father Dominic, who was our creative consultant on all things priestly. I spent time with him and chatted with him, and he was there on set when we filmed the pope's funeral.

"But being with him was also like seeing behind the curtain in a way, because you're not seeing things from the congregation's point of view. There's stuff under the table, a mechanism that isn't that glamourous."

An odd fit in vestments, to be sure, his performances as Star Wars' white-robed Obi Wan Kenobi notwithstanding. Still, director Ron Howard wanted McGregor badly enough that he changed the character from Italian to Irish, so it would be less of a leap, accent-wise, for the Scottish-born actor.

Similarly, when Howard was interested in directing the movie of The Alamo (a directorial job that eventually went to John Lee Hancock), he was in talks with McGregor to play one of the heroes of that seminal battle of the American Southwest. Which character?

"It was so long ago, I don't even remember.

"But I ran into Ron a few times in London when he was making The Da Vinci Code. We used to run into each other in a restaurant called The Wolseley, and he'd go there with his family for Sunday brunch, as would I. And we'd say hello to each other. And then, when he approached me to do this, I was very excited to work with him and Tom (Hanks).

"I read the script, and it was a very interesting, almost old-fashioned type thriller. The-clock-is-ticking and all that."

In the film, Hanks stars as symbologist Robert Langdon, who must unravel mysterious clues by the secret society called The Illuminati, before four kidnapped cardinals are killed and an anti-matter bomb destroys the Vatican.

McGregor is into saying "yes" to movies these days. As we speak in the Eternal City, he's taking a break from starring in Roman Polanski's The Ghost, which he's been shooting in Berlin since February.

Prior to that, he shot two movies simultaneously in Louisiana and Toronto, the "gay prison-escape love story" I Love You, Phillip Morris with Jim Carrey, and Amelia, the Amelia Earhart biopic starring Hilary Swank, in which McGregor played the aviatrix's sometime boyfriend Gene Vidal (Gore's dad).

"So for two or three months, while I was making the film with Jim, I was making the film with Hilary in Toronto and literally I was going back and forward and back and forward. It was quite exciting. In fact, I quite liked it. It was like the way it used to be in repertory theatre -- you know we would be acting at night in one play, rehearsing another one during the day and learning another one on your coffee break.

"And it worked easily, you're on a different set with different actors. And being on the plane gives you a chance to look at the work you're about to do, and vice versa on the way back."

Oddly, McGregor spent practically no time in Rome on Angels & Demons, his "Vatican" being a set built at the Hollywood Park racetrack. When they did shoot some locations in Italy, it was in a town near Naples called Caserta.

"I thought it was going to be a beautiful place. I'd just finished Toronto, and I said to my wife, 'Why don't you come to Caserta and spend a week. It'll be beautiful, it's by a lake or something.' And we arrive there and it's just a hellhole. It's very mafioso, and we got there and there was a strike, the mafioso were stopping people collecting the garbage, so there was garbage everywhere."

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