If you were at university in the decade after 1996, you probably remember the posters. On them was a block of grey text, laid out as if it were the Declaration of Independence. “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f***ing big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players …” It was the opening monologue of Trainspotting and it was everywhere. Somehow, a film about junkies in Edinburgh had become a global phenomenon – a hit that changed the lives of all involved.
One actor went on to be Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, another married Angelina Jolie. The director conquered Hollywood. And even in the middle of America, where you have to imagine audiences struggling somewhat with that Edinburgh brogue, people would fondly recall snatches of dialogue, like the part where Renton, the hero, and Sick Boy are lying on the grass at the edge of a park and preparing to shoot someone’s dog with an air rifle. They are discussing the sad decline of Sean Connery.
“At one point you’ve got it, then you lose it, and it’s gone for ever,” says Sick Boy. “George Best, for example. Had it. Lost it. Or David Bowie, or Lou Reed.” Connery’s 1986 film, The Name of the Rose “is merely a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory”, he says.
“So we all get old and we can’t hack it any more,” a youthful Ewan McGregor, as Renton, replies sarcastically. “That’s your theory?”
“Yeah,” says Sick Boy. He speaks with a heavy Edinburgh accent and he was played, beautifully and convincingly, by Jonny Lee Miller, a young actor from Kingston, in Surrey.
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Now here we are, 20 years later. Nearly all the people who bought the poster and pinned it to their wall have, by now, chosen life, a career and all the rest of it. And now there’s another Trainspotting film. I ask Miller what Sick Boy would make of that. Would he think you’ve still got it? Or would he think you had got old?
“The point of it is that we have all got old,” Miller replies. “It’s key to what this film is about.”
We’re in a gloomy hotel suite overlooking Central Park. Miller, 44, is recumbent in an armchair, dressed all in black and with dark stubble. He reminds me of a soldier off-duty, trying to relax, but never quite at ease. We’re meeting to talk about T2 Trainspotting – that is the whole point of this interview – but he doesn’t want to give much away.
So it’s about getting older?
“I think I can say that hopefully people can identify with it,” he says. “It’s about love and loss, and about what you do with your life after the rebellion and anger and passion and youthful energy of the first movie – that’s not the same for people when they get into middle age. That’s really what the movie addresses, and how things have changed. There’s a lot of reflection in it. I think the first movie was successful because people could identify with it. They’ll be able to identify with this one, I hope, but for a whole different set of reasons.”
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Is there forgiveness in the film? I mean, at the end of the first one, Renton runs off with all the money.
“I’m not going to tell you that,” he replies.
He doesn’t want to spoil it, I suppose, given the anticipation that awaits its release. But we’re in a bit of a pickle here. I haven’t been allowed to see the film, and he can’t talk about it. We proceed like two men playing an extremely awkward game of Give Us a Clue.
The first film caused some controversy, I say, tentatively. Some people seemed to think it was an advertisement for a life on smack, possibly basing this assumption on Renton’s description of the pleasures of heroin: “Take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you’re still nowhere near it.” But now America is in the grip of a new epidemic. Heroin is back. The timing seems apt.
Miller shakes his head. “It’s not really about that.”
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He will tell me that he liked the script when he saw it. “I heard the other guys did too.” Danny Boyle was “into it” as well, he says.
I imagine it was a little bit harder to find run-down patches of Glasgow to shoot in, now that the city has been overrun by hipsters. And Scotland has changed too, surely. In the first film there was a scene on a windswept Scottish moor. “Doesn’t it make you proud to be Scottish,” cries a clean-living character named Tommy, who is trying to make the others go for a walk.
“We’re the lowest of the f***ing low,” Renton shouts back. “Some people hate the English, but I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers …We’re ruled by effete assholes.”
Since then: devolution, the rise of the Scottish National Party, a tight referendum, another likely.
“There’s a lot of things in the movie about how Scotland has changed, yes, there are – I think it’s quite smart in that respect,” Miller says. “But there are a lot of things that are the same, man, I’m telling you, personally. You see the same kind of people stumbling down the street in Edinburgh that you did back then.”
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They shot mostly in England, but they did a few days in Glasgow and more in Edinburgh, he says, and glances towards the window that looks out onto Central Park. “Especially coming from here, it’s a different vibe. Certain things haven’t changed like you might expect. There are still those communities that are ravaged,” he says “A lot of things haven’t changed.”
Miller was in his early twenties when he made Trainspotting, although he had been acting professionally since he was a child.
“It’s something of a family business,” he says. Both his parents had worked at the BBC and his grandfather, Bernard Lee, was a prolific actor, most famous for playing M in the Bond films. He probably did a fabulous Sean Connery impression.
Though young at the time, Miller remembers going to the cinema to see his grandfather’s final Bond film, 1979’s Moonraker. “He actually made more than 100 movies, my grandfather. The British film industry was massive back then … He made movies with Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck. Big, big stars used to come over. He did some great stuff.”
He really looked the part as M: stern, concerned, slightly grandfatherly, too, I say.
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“He was perfect for that. A military man as well, a Second World War veteran.”
He served as a captain in the Royal Sussex Regiment, Miller says. “He was promoted to captain because all the others kept dying. I saw that in a letter he wrote once. It was pretty full-on.”
After Miller got his union card, at the age of eight, he started making good money for a chap still at school, appearing in TV series. He met his longtime friend Jude Law at the age of 14 at the National Youth Music Theatre: they did shows together in the school holidays and travelled to the Edinburgh Festival.
Miller cut a deal with his father: once he had done his GCSEs he could leave school for the stage, and bit parts on The Bill, Casualty, Inspector Morse and other TV shows followed. He worked the evenings tearing tickets at the Drury Lane Theatre. Steadily the TV jobs got bigger. He moved in with Jude Law. “We were both young, working actors and living in a s****y flat in Kentish Town.” He made it onto EastEnders, then he was cast in the prescient teen crime film Hackers in 1995.
Now he was off to New York. Law must have been jealous, I say.
“I think Jude had made a couple of movies by that point himself,” Miller replies. “We’re both very different people in that respect. We never felt like we were stealing from each other.”
Right.
“Why would I be jealous of his double Academy Award nominations. Who wants that?”
Exactly, I say. That’s not what you’re in it for.
“No,” Miller smiles and sighs. “I’m not in it for Academy Awards.”
“You couldn’t do it now. I went to the audition straight off the plane, really tired, with my bag
Sick Boy would absolutely agree with this, of course. “That means f*** all,” he says in Trainspotting, when Renton points out that Sean Connery actually won an Academy Award a year after The Name of the Rose, for The Untouchables. “The sympathy vote.”
He and Jolie got together shooting Hackers, back when she was still being introduced at parties as Jon Voight’s daughter. “I found myself here in New York at a hotel just over there,” he says, pointing across the park. “It was just the time of my life.” Miller once described it as “a movie romance” that “spiralled out of control”.
He was back in America on a visit when he got called to audition for Trainspotting and flew back to London. “It’s the kind of thing you couldn’t conceive of doing now, being that tired or whatever,” he says. “I remember going to the audition straight off the plane, hanging around in London for a few hours, and going there with my bag, going in and doing an audition and pulling it off.”
Maybe they liked the 1,000-yard stare?
“Who knows? But you’ve got so much energy then. It worked out.”
They shot it in six weeks, as he remembers. “You can’t hang about when you’ve only got a £1.5 million budget.” The cast knew it was good, and he recalls the excitement in Scotland because it was based on a beloved novel – Irvine Welsh’s debut book.
“The whole thing is a fond memory,” he says. “I remember being in the disused Wills cigarette factory, which is what we used as the studio. That’s where they built the sets … Actually, we did the same kind of thing this time around, in an old coffin warehouse.”
There is a rather logical progression in there somewhere. I ask if it was frightening to stand next to Robert Carlyle, when he was in character as Francis Begbie, the terrifying, semi-psychotic drunk.
“No.” Miller frowns, and looks at me with some concern. “It’s not real.”
Carlyle was older than the others. “We became very close, actually,” he says. “He was the more experienced, older brother kind of guy.”
The film came out to riotous acclaim. “I missed a lot of it. I was away in the US,” he says.
In retrospect, I say, do you think you didn’t quite capitalise on the fact that it was such a hit?
“Probably,” he replies. “I guess I was focused on other things. I could say that.”
In fact, he struggles to recall the projects he worked on during that time, except for a TV western shot in Texas, in which he got to be a cowboy.
Look, he was busy getting married to Jolie. They wed a month after Trainspotting came out in a small ceremony, reportedly attended only by one of his friends and her mother, though it was recorded that he had worn black leather, and she a white shirt on which she had scrawled his name in her own blood. She had drawn the blood herself, she later told The New York Times, using a clean surgical needle. “You’re about to marry him. You can sacrifice a little to make it really special,” she said. We learnt that Miller kept a snake named Harry in their home in Los Angeles, and that he had a tattoo of a snake on his wrist. “I won’t say anything about him, because that is Jonny’s private life,” she said. “But he is pretty wild.”
I love that quote. It makes Miller look fantastic. Of course, he will say nothing at all about it. “Personal life, I’m afraid,” he says, though in the past he has suggested that when they separated, amicably, a year later, it was partly because he missed Britain. She wanted to live in New York; he wanted to go home.
“I know this sounds mad, but I was missing little things like the Nine O’Clock News, red buses, country smells, the sound of our rock music and Match of the Day,” he told a no-doubt baffled interviewer in 1999, just as their divorce papers were coming through. He left Jolie so that he could spend more time with Michael Buerk and Peter Sissons.
He did various things after that. He was part of a film company, set up with McGregor, and he was cast in a Woody Allen film, a process that culminated, apparently, with a ten-minute chat in Allen’s office. “Just a chat about life, and what you have been up to,” says Miller. “He’s withdrawn and quiet. A quiet man.”
That was Melinda and Melinda. In 2010 he got to work with Danny Boyle again, in a stage version of Frankenstein. Boyle’s conceit for the show was that Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch would alternately play Victor Frankenstein and the Creature, night by night. The idea “was to capture that relationship between him and his creation”, says Miller. He and Cumberbatch “ended up figuring out that we could share stuff and exchange ideas”.
I tell him a friend of mine saw it several times, and felt that Miller was slightly more natural as the monster than Cumberbatch. As Angelina Jolie said, he is pretty wild.
Miller says being the Creature – being born on stage, falling naked out of a drum and coming alive, slowly, before the audience – was “one of the most satisfying experiences on stage I’ve ever had … Some nights, you could hear people get overwhelmed by it. It’s really special. That’s the first thing that happens, and you’re butt naked as well.”
Afterwards, “You’ve lost a few pounds and you’re soaking wet,” he says. “It was like a f***ing workout.”
“Marriage to Angelina Jolie was ‘a movie romance that spiralled out of control’
But Miller is actually fit as a fiddle. He has run nearly 20 marathons, he says, and 5 ultra-marathons, which were 50 or 100 miles. A few years before his turn as Frankenstein and the Creature, he was recruited by Ben Fogle and James Cracknell to be the third member of a three-man team in a race to the South Pole. They trained in Norway. “It was like the best ten days of my life,” he says. “I love doing stuff like that. I love that regimen.”
Miller comes alive talking about this. He sounds more enthusiastic about being thrown into frozen lakes than he does about any of his films.
He learnt how to manage his core temperature to stay alive in Arctic conditions, he says. “You’ve got to respect it because it will f***ing kill you … Even Norway, the coldest it got was minus 20C and that’s not that cold. You see the frostbite start … It can be scary and overwhelming, but they teach you so well what you have to do in order to stay alive.”
The course “was run by a bunch of former Marines,” he says. “I’m in my element. Part of me really should have joined up. I love it. I like being bossed around in terrible conditions and learning really great s***.”
I ask if that mentality translates to his work as an actor, getting bossed around by a director. “I don’t know,” he says. “They’re pretty different.”
Mostly, I think he is disappointed that I have changed the subject.
“I’m good at taking instruction,” he goes on. “I’m not the guy that says, ‘Oh no, we should do it this way.’ I will ask a lot of questions, but a lot of really good actors tend to have their own way of doing things. You don’t want to be that person if you’re f***ing learning how to stay alive in the Arctic.”
Sadly, for Miller, he had to pull out of the South Pole race when the television show he was contractually obliged to be in got picked up for a second season. Plus, by the time of the race he was married to the actress Michele Hicks, and they had just had a son, Buster. “He was born early December, and it wouldn’t have been that cool to disappear to the South Pole,” he says.
Now the family lives in New York, and he plays Sherlock Holmes, coincidentally as a heroin addict, in the TV series Elementary (shown here on Sky Living), now in its fifth series, with Lucy Liu as his Dr Watson. And he fundraises for research into MPS III, a rare and debilitating enzyme disease. The son of a guy he works with has it. Researchers are on the verge of a cure, he says, but there isn’t much time. “Because there aren’t that many people suffering from it, there’s no legislation and no incentive to develop drugs.” So he ran ultra-marathons to raise money and journeyed to Washington DC to lobby people in Congress.
It helps that he is quite well known now. People recognise him in the street. The other evening he was at a UFC event in Madison Square Garden – one of those things where muscled martial-arts fighters beat each other senseless in a cage. “A police officer came up and was like, ‘Dude, I love your show,’ ” he says.
Do you have any regrets?
“Not that I’m going to tell you,” he replies.
But he is quite delighted to be Sick Boy once more. It was “a special thing, for us to be able to get back together again”, he says. “The opportunity was not lost on any of us, how amazing it was. If you could go back and revisit something and do a dream project, that would probably be it, and we managed to do it.”
Does Sick Boy still do a great Connery impersonation? My editor wanted to know this, which shows, I suppose, how big an impression it made. After Trainspotting, people did impressions of Miller doing impressions of Connery.
“There are references, but no,” Miller says, and then pauses to reconsider the question more philosophically. “It may not be on camera, but I’m sure he still does a really good Sean Connery,” he says at last. I’m sure Miller still does one, too.
T2 Trainspotting is released on January 27