Choosing Life

The years drifted by. The players drifted apart. But despite all the odds, Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie are finally back in T2 Trainspotting, a sequel with a surprising link to The Likely Lads.

- Alex Godfrey

JONNY LEE MILLER WAS BRICKING IT. It had been ten years since he’d seen Robert Carlyle, longer since he’d crossed paths with Ewan McGregor and Ewen Bremner, and two decades since the Trainspotting comrades had all been in a room together, at the film’s wrap party. So when, a week before shooting was scheduled to begin on long-awaited sequel T2 Trainspotting last May, Danny Boyle asked the cast to get together to rehearse some scenes, it was a big deal. Miller was anxious as it was, of making a film that could potentially tarnish the legacy of Trainspotting, of disappointing an entire generation. And, to add to his already fragile condition as he travelled to the set for the first time in Bathgate (midway between Edinburgh and Glasgow), he contracted food poisoning from the breakfast he’d picked up en route. By the time he got there, he was done for.

“I was so nervously excited,” he remembers, “and I ended up throwing up in the bathroom. It was like, ‘Nice to see you, I gotta go vomit.’ And it just felt weirdly, awfully appropriate for Trainspotting, throwing up in a bathroom, having not seen these guys for years, hoping that they didn’t think I’d developed some awful drug habit.”