The ‘Trainspotting’ Gang Is Back, Older, Not Wiser
“Wonderful! Smashing!” the director Danny Boyle called out, as Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle finished their fifth take of a tense and poignant scene that comes near the end of “T2: Trainspotting.” He laughed. “Literally smashing,” he said to onlookers, referring to the brutal events with which the scene ends.
Mr. Boyle, who directed the first “Trainspotting,” was not far from the end of the 53- day shoot last summer that reunited the original quartet of actors — Mr. McGregor, Mr. Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller and Ewen Bremner — for a much-anticipated sequel to the mordant, bitingly irreverent 1996 movie about heroin addiction, sex, squalor and friendship set to a memorably rousing soundtrack in a very tourist-unfriendly Edinburgh. ( It is now in worldwide release.)
“You can’t avoid the first film,” Mr. Boyle said later. “You keep bumping into it whether you like it or not.”
That’s because the original “Trainspotting,” based on Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel of the same name, was a phenomenon; a low- budget film that became one of the most successful movies ever made in Britain. “It’s terrifying if you think about living up to the success of the first film,” Mr. Boyle said. “You have to put it away because it can’t be a specter following you.”
British reviews for the new film were largely enthusiastic. “What began as a zeitgeisty outlaw romp in the Uncool Britannia of the 1990s is now reborn as a scabrous and brutal black comedy about middle-aged male disappointment and fear of death,” Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian.
“T2: Trainspotting” picks up 20 years after the end of the first movie, as Mark Renton (Mr. McGregor) returns to Edinburgh from Amsterdam, where he has been living since fleeing with the proceeds of a drug deal, stolen from his friends. He reunites with Spud (Mr. Bremner) and Simon ( Mr. Miller), known as Sick Boy in the first film, and the plot is set in motion when the terrifyingly violent Begbie (Mr. Carlyle) escapes from jail and discovers that his old frenemy is back in town.
Mr. Boyle said that although there had been no studio pressure to make a sequel after the first film, people asked him about it constantly. “It became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said. “I’d joke and say, ‘They aren’t old enough yet.’ ”
After Mr. Welsh published “Porno,” an equally squalid sequel to “Trainspotting,” in 2002, Mr. Boyle and John Hodge, who wrote the first film’s screenplay, made a stab at an adaptation, but decided it wasn’t good enough.
“As the 20-year anniversary came up, we started to think well, maybe we should have another go,” Mr. Boyle said. “John, Andrew Macdonald, who produced the first film, and I got together for a week in Edinburgh and talked through ideas. It became about masculinity, men aging badly, not dealing with time very well — not another high-jinks version of the first film.” Mr. Boyle added that changing the mood made it easier not to mind the pressure around a sequel. “We were not just repeating the formula, although there is some of that too,” he said. “Then again, the characters are trying desperately to relive the past too.”
The four principal actors have all had successful careers since “Trainspotting,” as has Mr. Boyle, who has subsequently directed “The Beach,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Steve Jobs,” among other films.
Mr. McGregor said that the experience of working on the second film had made him feel mindful of the passing of time: “From 22 to 45 in the blink of an eye,” he said.