At the Telluride Film Festival this weekend, Danny Boyle announced he is planning to do a sequel to Trainspotting, his gritty 1996 film about drug addicts in Edinburgh which starred Ewan McGregor (Renton), Robert Carlyle (Begbie), Johnny Lee Miller (Sick Boy), and Ewen Bremner (Spud).
There has been much anticipation of a sequel to the smash hit for the last several years and it looks like it will finally be coming together. Fresh off rave reviews for Steve Jobs at the Colorado festival, the director told Deadline, “All the four main actors want to come back and do it. Now it is only a matter of getting all their schedules together which is complicated by two of them doing American TV series.” Miller is the star of CBS’ Elementary and Carlyle is a regular on ABC’s Once Upon a Time.
The film sequel is based on Porno, Scottish writer Irvine Welsh’s 2002 sequel to his original Trainspotting novel. John Hodge, Oscar nominated screenwriter for the first film, will be adapting the screenplay for the sequel as well. This time, the main characters get back together against the backdrop of the pornography business, rather than heroin use. Boyle told Deadline, “Hodge’s script is terrific.”
McGregor, whose career was launched by Trainspotting, had previously had a falling out with Boyle after the director replaced McGregor with Leonardo DiCaprio in 2000’s The Beach. In an interview with Details last year, McGregor admitted, “It was an unfortunate situation, and it wasn’t handled well. I was very upset. But time has gone by, and we put to bed the bad feelings and all of that shit.” The actor told Entertainment Weekly last year that he would be game for a Transpotting sequel, saying “I’m very excited by the idea of it. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it before, but in the last few years, I’ve completely changed my mind. I think it would be quite an amazing thing to make a sequel to a movie 20 years later, with all the same characters.”