Robert Carlyle admits he didn’t like being known as Trainspotting’s Begbie at first but now feels blessed and hopes to make a third film – set in a care home.
The 58-year-old first played the glass-throwing hardman in 1996 and revisited the part in 2017 for T2 Trainspotting.
He said: “I maybe struggled against it a wee bit, kicked against it a wee bit at first because you’re like, ‘Ah, that’s not all I am’.
(Image: Daily Record)
“But thank God for it – it’s led to so many different things for me and people love it. It’s like, you’re in people’s psyche.
“I’m blessed to have been part of it. It seems like there’s not a week goes by that somebody doesn’t go, ‘Hey, Begbie’.”
He and the film’s stars Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller stay in touch via email and he would team up with them again in a heartbeat, although he joked: “It’d have to be set in a rest home, probably. Skagboys Rest Home. It might take that long but Danny might do it.”
Father-of-three Robert now lives in Vancouver, Canada, because of his work on TV shows Stargate Universe and Once Upon a Time but will return to UK telly this Sunday playing Ogilvy in the BBC’s The War of the Worlds – a three-part adaptation of HG Wells’s tale of Martian invasion, also starring Eleanor Tomlinson.
(Image: Daily Record)
And the lifelong Labour supporter will also be playing a Tory prime minister in Sky’s new political drama, Cobra.
He admitted he wasn’t an “obvious choice” to play Robert Sutherland in the series.
Carlyle said: “I had to really think about playing a Conservative prime minister.
“I’ve never really been in that world before as an actor.”
