The craziest character in the 1996 film Trainspotting was Robert Carlyle’s Begbie. The actor has gone on to a great career including films like The Full Monty and 28 Weeks Later as well as lead roles on series like Stargate: Universe and the long-running hit, Once Upon A Time, but it looks like he may be ready to revisit Begbie for a third time (He was also in the Trainspotting sequel: T2). In a new report, we’re now learning that there’s a Television spin-off project in early development that would focus exclusively on the Begbie Character. The project will be at least loosely based on The Blade Artist, a Trainspotting spinoff book about Begbie. Here’s what he told interviewers about the new series:
“Irvine and myself have been chatting quite a lot recently with a couple of excellent producers in London… 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.”
“I think we’re thinking about doing it as six one-hour ‘television event piece’, as they say nowadays. 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. So after a few chats we thought that’s the way forward.”
If you’ve never read, or heard of The Blade Artist, here’s the synopsis of the book:
Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life – and is now unrecognisable, even to himself. A successful painter and sculptor, he lives quietly with his wife, Melanie, and their two young daughters, in an affluent beach town in California. Some say he’s a fake and a con man, while others see him as a genuine visionary. But Francis has a very dark past, with another identity and a very different set of values. When he crosses the Atlantic to his native Scotland, for the funeral of a murdered son he barely knew, his old Edinburgh community expects him to take bloody revenge. But as he confronts his previous life, all those friends and enemies – and, most alarmingly, his former self – Francis seems to have other ideas. When Melanie discovers something gruesome in California, which indicates that her husband’s violent past might also be his psychotic present, things start to go very bad, very quickly. The Blade Artist is an elegant, electrifying novel – ultra violent but curiously redemptive – and it marks the return of one of modern fiction’s most infamous, terrifying characters, the incendiary Francis Begbie from Trainspotting.
Source: Collider