STACK NZ Feb #81

CINEMA FEATURE

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)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

7 wenty 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

STACK 's Gill Pringle with Jonny Lee Miller

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.

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

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,”

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FEBRUARY 2017

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