Robert Carlyle

It has taken 20 years but director Danny Boyle has finally managed to reunite the cast of his ground breaking 1996 cult film ‘Trainspotting’. Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Johnny Lee Miller and Ewan Bremner were all there on the orange carpet for the premiere in Edinburgh. The original ‘Trainspotting’ tracked the sordid and tragi-comic side of Scottish street life via the friends’ drug-addled criminal activity set to a pulsating soundtrack. The 1996 film won huge critical acclaim and gave voice to a largely unknown section of British society. Like the first film, ‘T2 Trainspotting’ contains elements of shameless fun, heart-racing sequences and excruciating moments. But it is essentially about the nature of friendship, getting older and the far-reaching consequences of a risky youth. ‘T2’ catches up with the lads now in middle age, but Boyle’s mix of old and new and an interwoven sound track is just as thrilling. The question is why did it take him so long? ‘‘The truth is we didn’t have a good enough script until now and without a good enough script Irvine (Welsh, writer of the original novel), you know the Irvine stories are so extraordinary that we needed a film script that John (Hodge, screen writer-adapter) finally managed to produce and so he kept us waiting until the last possible moment and then he turned in his script and as soon as he gave it us I knew we’d make it, I knew I’d be here, knew the four of them would do it, I just knew…” #T2Trainspotting stars Ewen Bremner, mcgregor_ewan, jonnyjlm and robertcarlyle_ at the World Premiere! pic.twitter.com/GgDucy9PUA— T2 Trainspotting (T2Trainspotting) January 22, 2017 “(The script) was clever and personal and emotional and we were thrilled to get to play these people again. There’s something about them that we feel that we know them, that they are friends of ours,” said Ewan McGregor, who plays anti-hero Renton. Robert Carlyle indicated it was worth the wait: “Danny (Boyle) was always determined that he wouldn’t do it until we were in actual fact 20 years older. Back in the day, you’re thinking ‘Well, you could put makeup on’ and you could do this, but he was absolutely right, I don’t need the makeup now, I’ve got the gray in my hair, so he was right, he was absolutely right.” Irvine Welsh, who wrote Trainspotting and Porno, the sequel novel on which the new film is loosely based, prefers the second film to the first. “The first one is a big energy rush and … it showed people a world that many people didn’t know existed at the time,” he said. “This one is much more layered, it’s much deeper. It still has that visceral kind of energy but it kind of unravels .. it’s much greater emotional complexity – because the character are more emotionally complex and have been on a big journey and we’re invested in the characters so we are invested in everything that’s happened to them.”