One of cinema’s biggest psychos, Begbie from Trainspotting, is heading to TV for a spinoff series.
Actor Robert Carlyle, who intensely portrayed the character in the cult 1996 film and its 2017 sequel, confirmed the surprising news to NME. It’s an adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting follow-up novel The Blade Artist and it’s currently in the early stages of production.
“Irvine (Welsh) and myself have been chatting quite a lot recently with a couple of excellent producers in London about (continuing the Trainspotting story),” Carlyle said.
“As you know there was another book called The Blade Artist which is just entirely about Begbie and his mad story. It’s still in its early moments but it’s looking pretty good that this will happen eventually.”
The Blade Artist is actually the fifth of Welsh’s novels to focus on the Trainspotting characters and the plot is initially shocking: Begbie is now a reformed man, now going by the name Jim Francis and living in California with his wife and two daughters. Maybe the Californian sun is all it takes to calm a pyscho down and stop them regularly trying to attack people.
“I think we’re thinking about doing it as six one-hour ‘television event piece’, as they say nowadays,” Carlyle continued. “Whatever that means. But it seemed to me to be right to look at it like that, and Irvine loved that idea.
It’s such a massive story – it’s all Los Angeles back and forth to Edinburgh – and it’s difficult to do all that in an hour and a half! Especially if you want to keep the basis of that book pure. I think nowadays people like the event thing too – they like ‘six hours of this… bang.’ They can boxset it. They can binge it.
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So after a few chats we thought that’s the way forward. So that’s the plan. Sometime in the next year and a bit we’ll hopefully be talking again and we’ll be talking about the return of Begbie.”
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Check out Begbie’s iconic bar fight scene in Trainspotting:
