Trainspotting's engine that could

Interview, August, 1996 by Mark Jolly

As a child growing up in a small Scottish town, Ewan McGregor wanted to be everything that his actor uncle, Denis Lawson, was: someone different from the rest of the crowd. McGregor's performances in two of the most daring films of the '90s - the sardonic thriller Shallow Grave and the Brit movie-of-the-moment Trainspotting - have now turned that aspiration into a reality. Among a glut of young Hollywood-bound U.K. actors, McGregor has singled himself out with his instinctive gift for ambivalence - an ability to tiptoe across the psychological high-wire between soulful and nihilistic, cocksure and charming, victim and victor.

In Trainspotting, adapted from Irvine Welsh's novel and made by the Shallow Grave team of writer John Hedge, producer Andrew Macdonald, and director Danny Boyle, McGregor plays Renton, an on-and-off heroin addict who can't decide whether to clean up or regress in the company of his loser friends in working-class Edinburgh, and later in London. Renton is dreamy, sharp, troubled, and calm, seemingly all at the same time, and you never know where you are with him, as he never knows where he is with himself. It's an understated portrayal of an essentially rootless character - yet a magnetic one.

While still in drama school, McGregor was chosen to play a young cockney conscript who daydreams of being a rock 'n' roller in Dennis Potter's TV miniseries Lipstick on Your Collar. He was the ambitious seducer Julien Sorel in Scarlet and Black for the BBC, and in Shallow Grave, the smart-ass journalist who winds up staked to the floorboards with a demonic smile on his face and a kitchen knife through his shoulder. He brings his urbane side to Jane Austen in this month's Emma, and has key roles in Peter Greenaway's latest film, The Pillow Book, and the recently completed American movie Nightwatch. "Choose life. Choose a career," Renton sneers at the beginning of Trainspotting. Ewan McGregor is making the most of his choices with no such need for ironic reflection.

MARK JOLLY: Ewan, what's your understanding of the title Trainspotting?

EWAN MCGREGOR: The first thing is that heroin users mainline along their arms and inject up and down on the main vein. "Station to station," they call it. And for addicts, everything narrows down to that one goal of getting drugs. Maybe "trainspotters" are like that, obsessively taking down the numbers of trains.

MJ: I heard you lost twenty-eight pounds to play Renton in the movie.

EM: Yeah. My wife was my dietician. Basically, I just stopped drinking beer and the weight fell off me. It's nice playing with your physicality.

MJ: What research did you do?

EM: I read books on crack and heroin. Then I went up to Glasgow and met people from the Calton Athletic Recovery Group, which is an organization of recovering heroin addicts who don't use methadone to come off [the drug]; they just come off day by day. They also play a lot of soccer.

MJ: Did it feel strange befriending these ex-junkies so you could pretend to be like them afterward?

EM: No, because they knew the score. They'd read Trainspotting [the book] and loved it. We developed a working relationship with them.

MJ: What's your own experience with drugs?

EM: I've never shot drugs. But we did "cookery" classes at Calton. It was six actors sitting around a table with little bits of glucose powder. I always imagined that cooking a shot was ritualized, and you had to be very precise with it, but Eamon [Doherty], our drugs adviser, said, "No, it's not a ritual - it's a pain in the arse until you get it into your arm." It was weird how mundane it all was.

MJ: The scene in which you get injected - is that your arm?

EM: Yeah, but in that scene I'm getting an AIDS test, not shooting heroin. It is my arm, and that was quite good, actually. After pretending to shoot up for six or seven weeks, it came as quite a relief to have a needle in my arm. I was like, "Go on, stick it in me."

MJ: And while we're talking about specific scenes, what was it like sticking your head - in fact, your whole body - into a toilet?

EM: It was a set, of course, but it didn't really matter. It just looked disgusting, and by the end of the day I wanted to get out of there.

MJ: What did you learn about the drug culture that surprised you the most?

EM: There's a certain kudos about smack in Britain, a kind of romanticism - it's the one you really shouldn't do. They call it the "big bad one." Once I started working on the film, I realized there is no romantic aspect to being a heroin addict at all. Listening to these guys' experiences, the point of despair most of them had reached was extraordinary.

MJ: Wasn't there a danger that the film could glamorize heroin, especially with all the hysteria that greeted it?

EM: I'm absolutely fine about that because I know it doesn't glamorize heroin.

MJ: But the film looks very slick.

EM: Films do look slick - but Trainspotting doesn't make the heroin look slick. The reason people get upset about it is because they don't want to think about drugs as being the least bit pleasurable, but heroin makes you feel great - apparently - and we showed the people who do it feeling great in the movie. But then we show what happens if you get addicted, what happens to you as you die.