It’s been just shy of 20 years since filmmaker Danny Boyle captured movie fans’ attention with Trainspotting, his 1996 adaptation of a novel by Irvine Welsh about a group of heroin addicts in late-1980s Edinburgh. After years of hinting that he’d like to make a sequel to the film, Boyle now seems particularly keen on pushing the project forward — possibly as one of his next projects.
During an interview at the Telluride Film Festival after a screening of his Steve Jobs biopic, the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire director indicated that it’s only the schedules of the actors involved that’s holding up the process at this point.
“Now it is only a matter of getting all their schedules together,” Boyle told Deadline, “which is complicated by two of them doing American TV series.”
The actors in question are Elementary star Jonny Lee Miller, who plays a modern version of Sherlock Holmes in the CBS series, and Once Upon A Time actor Robert Carlyle, who plays Rumplestiltskin in the ABC series.
Along with Miller and Carlyle, the cast of the original film who are likely to return for a sequel include Ewan McGregor and Ewan Bremner.
Boyle has long indicated that a Trainspotting sequel would be loosely based on Welsh’s follow-up novel, Porno, which was published in 2002 and picks up ten years after the events of Trainspotting. Where drug addiction was a prevailing theme in the first novel, the pornography industry is a central theme of the sequel.
Upon its release in ’96, Trainspotting was nominated for and won a long list of awards, including an Academy Award nomination for John Hodge’s screenplay. (It eventually lost to Sling Blade that year.) Boyle himself went on to direct several acclaimed films, including the aforementioned Slumdog Millionaire and 2010’s Oscar-nominated 127 Hours. Much of the cast of Trainspotting went on to find success on the big screen and in television, with multiple nominations for Primetime Emmy Awards, Academy Awards, Golden Globe Awards, and various other accolades. The film has often been included in various lists of the greatest movies ever made, and is often ranked as one of the best British films of all time.
