The Trainspotting boys are back in town with a new movie
Choose life. Choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and hope that someone, somewhere, cares. Choose looking up old flames and wishing you’d done it all differently. And choose watching history repeat itself.
“Choose your future. Choose reality TV, slut shaming, revenge porn. Choose a zero-hours contract, a two-hour journey to work, and choose the same for your kids, only worse. Smother the pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in somebody’s kitchen.”
They’re back! Twenty years on, and here they are again: Renton, Spud, Sickboy, and Begbie. The 1996, era-defining, reference-spawning blinder of a movie, Trainspotting, has had a reboot, Trainspotting T2.
They’re going to do it all again. Director Danny Boyle has made a sequel, and he’s got the original four Leith boys — played by Ewan McGregor, Ewan Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, and Robert Carlyle — on board.
The trailer has had almost seven million views since November — the film is released on January 27. Not that we are counting the days.
Actually, we are.
Trainspotting is not so much a movie as a cultural phenomenon. We all spoke ‘Begbie’ for a while after, heroin chic and heroin horror merged, humour and awful were one and the same, the characters simultaneously sympathetic and vile. Apart from Begbie. He was just vile.
Before the film, the book, published in 1993, was an astonishing work, written in Edinburgh dialect, so that you had to read the first three chapters aloud to yourself to grasp the cadence and meaning.
Until Irvine Welsh came along, nobody outside Scotland had the faintest idea what a biscuit-ersed plukey radge might be. The book had a glossary in America, the movie overdubbed so Americans could understand it.
One of the most famous scenes of the original film, where Renton and Spud are barrelling down Edinburgh’s Prince’s Street pursued by police, soundtracked by Iggy’s ‘Lust For Life’, is recreated in the sequel.
Danny Boyle knows his audience — paying homage to the original is not self-referential as much as a fond nod to our 1990s memories.
He’s been thinking about a sequel for years, but wary of doing anything that might have diminished the original.
“My only concern was that the script would be good for two of them, and not so great for the other two, and they’d feel obliged to come back,” Boyle told film website, Cinemablend. “But they’ve all got good stuff and it’s very interesting look at them again.”
The screenplay is an adaptation of Porno, Irvine Welsh’s 2002 novel, which catches up with our four anti-heroes ten years after Trainspotting, and now principally connected not by heroin, but by various dubious strands of the sex industry.
John Hodge, the screenwriter who did the original Trainspotting adaptation — as well as Boyle’s earlier films, Shallow Grave, A Life Less Ordinary, and The Beach — moved Porno two decades ahead, into the present day, and changed the name to T2.
Boyle said he would have to run this title by James Cameron, as Cameron’s Terminator sequel is also called T2. Evidently Cameron didn’t mind.
The four actors, all of whom have been working successfully since Trainspottting, were keen on their cinematic reunion.
“We’re all somewhat protective of what Trainspotting means to people, and what it means to us,” Ewan McGregor told Collider Movie News.
“None of us want to make a poor sequel to it. So, had we not been presented with the most extraordinary script, which we were, I think we wouldn’t be making the sequel. But because we were, we are.”
Robert Carlyle told the NME how “This film is going to be quite emotional for people …You are going to be thinking, ‘Fuck, what have I done with my life?’ Have these four characters changed? Have they remained the same? Have they fucked it up completely? Have they achieved anything? And, of course, the audience are going to be asking themselves exactly the same questions.”
Because we are all 20 years older. Rave and techno is called EDM now. Ecstasy has been replaced by so-called legal highs, like Spice, and, unlike in 1996, when mobile phones were still not really a thing, we live our entire lives online now.
How the four characters, sparked by Renton’s return from Amsterdam exile, back to his Leith roots, interact with the digital age, as well as each other, should be interesting.
Irvine Welsh has written eleven novels in all, plus four collections of short stories, yet his standout work remains the Trainspotting collection, which, as well as Porno, includes a prequel, Skagboys, about the younger lives of the characters, before they were junkies.
Welsh’s latest novel, The Blade Artist, traces the somewhat unlikely trajectory of Francis Begbie’s transition from violent inmate of a Scottish prison to an affluent new life as a successful artist in California.
Unlikely, that is, unless the story is mirroring Welsh’s own journey from Edinburgh smackhead to internationally successful writer living in Chicago. You couldn’t make it up.
Born in Lancashire to Irish parents from Galway, Boyle is now 60. His most famous movie is not his breakthrough film, Trainspotting, but 2008’s Slum Dog Millionaire, which was nominated for ten Oscars and won eight, including best director.
Boyle orchestrated the Olympic ceremonies in London 2012, putting on a spectacular and critically acclaimed show.
He has directed 13 films, as well as theatre and television, and is widely regarded as a national treasure. He has turned down a knighthood, and keeps his personal life resolutely private.
Now 44, the Scottish actor went on to become a major star, and has starred in 58 films since 1996’s Trainspotting. Most famously, he has been part of the Star Wars franchise, as well as singing and dancing in Moulin Rouge and Little Voice.
He has appeared in an astonishing range of Hollywood output, from macho blockbusters, like Black Hawk Down, to his directorial debut this year, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, American Pastoral, in which he also stars.
When making his motorbike documentary odyssey, Long Way Around, in 2004, with his friend, Charley Boorman, McGregor was moved by the plight of street kids in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.
He and his wife, Eva Mavrakis, have four daughters, one of whom was adopted in Mongolia. The family live in Los Angeles.
Now 44, British actor Miller was married to Angelina Jolie at the time of Trainspotting’s release.
Since then, he has made a further 17 films, including playing Lord Byron, and is currently playing Sherlock Holmes in a long-running television series, Elementary. He lives in Malibu with his second wife and their son.
Also 44, Edinburgh-born Bremner has worked continuously since Trainspotting, in less well-known film and television roles, although he did appear in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, and in several blockbusters, including Black Hawk Down, alongside the other Ewan.
His speedfreak job interview is one of the classic Trainspotting scenes, his character offering a spark of vulnerability amidst the wolves. He lives in Edinburgh, and has one daughter.
The oldest of the four, at 55, Carlyle’s Begbie is one of cinema’s most entertaining psychopaths. A year later, he made The Full Monty, in 1997, one of the most popular British films of all time. He also co starred with Jonny Lee Miller in 1999’s swashbuckling Plunkett & Macleane.
Carlyle first made his name in 1990, in Ken Loach’s Riff Raff, and was arguably the best-known actor in the cast at the time of Trainspotting’s release. He lives in Glasgow with his wife and three children.
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