STACK NZ February 2017 Issue 81

6 / 30

7wenty years ago, a small
Scottish indie movie
announced the arrival
of four future stars, catapulting
Jonny Lee Miller, Ewan McGregor,
Kevin McKidd and Robert Carlyle
into the spotlight and likewise
cementing the career of director
Danny Boyle, who would later go
on to win an Oscar for Slumdog
Millionaire.
Although McGregor had
already worked with Boyle two
years earlier on Shallow Grave,
the buzz didn’t really start until
Trainspotting, which spoke to
disenfranchised youth as well as
rocking the best soundtrack of its
day.
“We were all pretty new apart
from Robert – that’s why he had
the ‘and Robert Carlyle’ credit,”
laughs Jonny Lee Miller, 44,
when STACK catches up with
him in New York, where he films
hit TV drama Elementary, having
portrayed Sherlock Holmes for five
years now.
But Trainspotting was a seminal
experience for all its cast, so
Miller wasn’t entirely surprised
when he received a postcard from
Boyle 18 months ago, simply
recalls Miller, who just months
later found himself reunited
with McGregor and Carlyle in
Edinburgh, along with original
Trainspotting cast members Ewen
Bremner, Kelly Macdonald and
Shirley Henderson.
With anticipation riding high for
T2: Trainspotting, Miller admits
to a certain level of anxiety. “It
wasn’t anything that any of us
took lightly. We were all quite
nervous about it. And none of
us had seen each other in ages.
Ewan and I used to be very close
but I hadn’t seen him in a very
long time. Life just took us in
different directions. And I was
very close with Robert as well
but hadn’t seen him in ten years
either, so it was amazing to come
back together again.
“It’s very surreal, but really
wonderful to have that opportunity
to do this all over again; to
suddenly be able to reconnect as
friends and colleagues as well,”
adds Miller, whose Sick Boy was
the only non-Scot among the main
cast.
Sick Boy, he says, has not
fared too well in the two decades
since we last saw him, having
traded heroin for a full-blown coke
habit. “I’m not ruling out heroin
entirely but Sick Boy is now a bit
of a cokehead. He’s still got a lot
of personal issues and he really
hasn’t moved on in his life. In the
first film, they’re a group in the
same situation, and here, they are
four individuals in very different
places.”
If it was a given that Sick Boy
was the cool one in the original
Trainspotting, Miller isn’t so sure
second time around.
)8//< 6,&.Sick Boy – aka Jonny Lee Miller – is back, along with a lot of personal issues he
hasn't resolved, in the hotly anticipated sequel T2:Trainspotting. Words Gill Pringle
06 FEBRUARY 2017
visit CINEMA FEATURE
If Sick Boy is cool
then the credit has
to go to screenwriter
John Hodge, and
his vision
stating: “We’re going to have a go
at T2. Will send a script when we
have one.”
A few months later the script
arrived in the mail. “I thought
it was pretty good and I heard
the other guys liked it too,”
STACK's Gill Pringle
with Jonny Lee Miller