ACTOR Ewan McGregor – who favoured his home country remaining part of the UK during the independence referendum in 2014 – has told how he “absolutely” would have voted for Scotland to leave in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote.

The star told the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme that he is “totally confused” about the issue of Scottish independence after the UK’s vote to leave the European Union.

He said he tried hard to stay out of the indy debate because he did not have a vote in the Scottish referendum and has not lived in the country since he was 17.

But he added: “The truth is I didn’t want Scotland to be independent in 2014. I didn’t understand how it was going to work. I was worried that Scotland would flounder if it was on its own and I believed in the Union and I felt like we were stronger together.

“Then Brexit's happened. Now I’m totally confused.”

McGregor told how he was filming Trainspotting 2 on the streets of Scotland the night the EU referendum results came in, and had been telling colleagues the count would swing back in favour of Remain.

“By the time I got home, I switched the television on and there’s [Nigel] Farage doing his victory speech and I thought, ‘He’s made a terrible mistake, he’s going to be embarrassed because he’s announced his victory too soon’,” he said.

“I thought he’d made a mistake but of course it wasn’t to be the case. That next day I would have voted absolutely for Scotland to leave, I really would have done.”

SNP constitution spokesman Tommy Sheppard said the actor’s views were shared by many.

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“Ewan McGregor’s comments reflect the views of very many people who are horrified that Scotland is being dragged out of the EU against our will and are now understandably reflecting on their position on Scottish independence,” he said.

“It is clear that the future people thought they were voting for in 2014 now looks very different.”

After the Brexit vote, McGregor accused Boris Johnson of behaving in a “spineless” manner after his announcement that he would not be running for Tory leader. He rebuked Johnson for campaigning to leave the EU and then not dealing with the consequences.

McGregor wrote: “You lead this ludicrous campaign to leave EU, win, and now f*** off to let someone else clear up your mess.”

Johnson announced his decision just hours after Michael Gove unexpectedly decided to run for leader instead of backing him.

McGregor went on to tell the programme how nerve-wracking it was for him to film Trainspotting 2, the sequel to the original 1996 movie that first made his name around the globe.

But he said reprising his role as heroin addict Mark Renton ended up being “like meeting an old friend”.

He said: “It was a very strange and wonderful experience to come back to characters 20 years later, and I have to say quite nerve-wracking, I was quite nervous about it.

“I started maybe a week or two after [co-stars] Ewen Bremner and Jonny Lee Miller and Bobby Carlyle did, so I came in and they were already up to speed.

“I met Ewen Bremner in a lunch queue and said, ‘I’m a bit nervous, what if I can’t find Renton?’.

“He said, ‘Look, we all felt like that, but wait till you’ve done your first scene, you’ll see’. And I did, because of course Renton is me and I am Renton and there’s something very sort of meta about the whole thing.

“So once we started it was like meeting an old friend again, it was great.”

McGregor is currently promoting his directorial debut, American Pastoral, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in the 1960s.