Trainspotting 2: Derailed by Health…Good Health

Ewan MacGregor: looking too young, healthy, and, well, clean, for a Trainspotting sequel. 

This got a little lost last week in Twilight-mania, but I found it amusing nonetheless.

AintItCoolNews was doing an interview with Danny Boyle, mostly about Slumdog Millionaire, when the topic of a much-muttered about sequel to Trainspotting, the film that put Boyle’s name on the film map, came up. Here’s what he had to say:

“The guy who wrote the original book Irvine Welsh, he wrote a sequel to it and we had a look at it, and there’s an idea we’ve got for it, but it depends on the guys, all of the same guys, playing all the same characters but twenty years later and they look twenty years older and the problem is at the moment they don’t. They all look exactly the same!
Quint (AICN): They look too good!
Danny Boyle: They just look exactly the same and I don’t know how they do it, well we do know how we do it don’t we? Actors. They’re in the sauna on the weekend and they’re kind of like moisturizing and it’s kind of like… (laughs)
Quint: They’re trapping the youth in! (laughs)
Danny Boyle: Yeah, and you think they’re hard drinking, partying and they’re not. They tucked up in bed at ten o’clock at night and all that kind of stuff, so they do look very well kept, so it wouldn’t work at the moment. You’d have to do so much makeup and stuff to change them enough…They don’t look like particularly older, so we have to wait really until, because it is a good idea… I think to go back to those characters twenty years later and they’re still in the city and the trigger is that Begbie the Bobby Carlyle character has been in jail for twenty years for murder and so him being released kind of retriggers everything.

So usually when you hear about actors from an original not being right for a sequel it’s because they look older, or fatter, or scragglier. But these actors would be playing a group of hard-core addicts twenty years on; the last thing you need is a bunch of gone-Hollywood actors who are buff, tan, and not bald. How dare they keep themselves looking good! So if you’re looking for a sequel to Trainspotting, it seems that you may have to wait until the original cast members are in their seventies. Though I bet Ewan MacGregor will still look pretty darn good at that age. Sigh.