The 2017 role that gave Ewan McGregor an existential crisis: “Fuck! What if I can’t do it?”
From belting out Elton John songs in the Moulin Rouge! to playing older versions of Danny Torrance and Christopher Robin to holding the high ground in the Star Wars franchise, Ewan McGregor has done just about everything there is to do in Hollywood.
Born to a pair of teachers in Perth, Scotland (albeit as a nephew of Star Wars actor Denis Lawson), he has risen the ranks all the way to the very top and has enjoyed all of the benefits of decades of hard work.
The role that made all of this possible was Mark ‘Rent Boy’ Renton in Danny Boyle’s generation-defining scuzzfest, Trainspotting. A heroin addict living in Edinburgh and going nowhere fast, Renton represents a number of young Scottish men in the 1990s whose futures were stolen by urban poverty. The film helped define the rugged realism of British cinema of this era and is still regarded as one of the finest films ever made on these isles and certainly one of the greatest Scottish movies of all time.
21 years after the first film took the world by storm, McGregor, Boyle, and many other cast members returned to the beautiful Scottish locales with a brand new story with T2: Trainspotting, which picks up the story with Renton now a sad, middle-aged man. After suffering a number of major life setbacks, he decides to return to his old stomping grounds and check in with some of his old pals. As you can imagine, this isn’t quite the magical reunion he might have wanted.
Speaking to The Guardian ahead of the sequel’s release, McGregor revealed that he had a number of concerns about reprising one of his most iconic roles. It wasn’t just Renton that was giving him pause, but the entire concept of returning to the land of his birth.
“I felt like Renton, going back,” he confessed, “I had these feelings like, ‘Shit! I haven’t lived in Scotland since I was 17!’ I moved to London to go to drama school, and I go home every year, because my parents are there, and my brother and his family, and I love it, but I haven’t lived there, and… Of all the characters I’ve played who’ve been Scots, Renton is the most Scottish of them all. And I suddenly thought, ‘Fuck! What if I can’t do it? What if I’m not Scottish enough any more?’”
Luckily for McGregor and everyone involved in the project, T2: Trainspotting went down a treat, with reviewers praising screenwriter John Hodge for recapturing the voices of the original characters while adding appropriate new layers through age.
It was also a modest box office success, raking in $42.1million on a budget of $18m, and while it didn’t quite change the world in the same way as the original, given how other legacy sequels have gone, this has got to be considered a victory.
Many actors have reprised famous characters for highly cynical reasons and paid the price for it, but McGregor’s return to Rent Boy was done for the right reasons and, as a result, the gamble paid off.
