He’s been a Bond villain, a space villain, a fairy-tale villain, too. But Scottish actor Robert Carlyle’s long and colourful screen career hinges on two roles he did in 1996 and 1997: Begbie in Trainspotting and Gaz in The Full Monty.
He’s already brought back the psychotic Begbie in T2 Trainspotting, director Danny Boyle’s 2019 revisit of author Irvine Welsh’s characters 20 years later.
Now it’s the turn of Gaz, the man who led his unemployed Sheffield mates to male striptease glory. He and the rest of the troupe return in an eight-part drama series of the same name for Disney+.
It’s yet another streaming revival of a past cinema hit, one giving the American-centric platform its first working-class English drama. The eight episodes are by the film’s original screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy, joined by Alice Nutter, who in 1997 was singing the hit Tubthumping in her former band Chumbawamba. And, yes, the show is about Gaz and mates getting knocked down and getting up again, despite their advancing years.
The Listener finds Carlyle, via Zoom, at home in Vancouver. He’s lived there for a decade-plus with his family after first being based there for television shows Stargate Universe (the space one) and Once Upon a Time (the fairy-tale one).
Just to be clear, there’s no stripping in this one?
Nobody wants to see that. Come on.
Just thought I should check, having seen the first few episodes and everyone has kept their kit on.
There is a nod to it in episode six … during the scene in question, You Can Leave Your Hat On gets pumped through the speakers and that music is so synonymous with the film, it just takes you back to that place. It was actually quite an emotional moment.
Did you need much persuading to do the show?
Not so much. I think if I had been asked before T2 it would have been a different thing, but T2 had been a good experience so it was an easier thing to imagine.
I guess there’s a similar theme to this and the Trainspotting sequel in that they are both about men of a certain age grappling with what they’ve done with their lives.
Yes. In T2, of course, Begbie is exactly where you expect him to be, which is in jail, but the other three are pretty much in the same world. With this, it would have been insane to try to make a Full Monty 2 film as it were, because that was then and this is now. I know Simon had been asked a few times to write a second film, but it was never something he was interested in and it wasn’t something that I would have been interested in either, really, purely because the end of the first one was so triumphant. So in Simon’s conversations with me, he said, “Well, what about an eight-part TV show and let’s pick up where these guys are now 25 years later?” I thought, “Yeah, this can definitely work.”
What did the original film do for your career?
Well, I’m sitting here talking to you. It was obviously fantastic. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to be involved in both The Full Monty and Trainspotting pretty much back to back. If you’re lucky as an actor, you maybe touch one film like that in your career. But I’m blessed in that two came along.
The original Full Monty had a difficult production and the film was headed straight to video. Did that give you pause for thought when it came to making a show for a streaming platform 25 years later?
I understand what happened at the time because it was a really difficult shoot. People might imagine that making a comedy would be a nice or entertaining thing to do, and it can be. But it can also be incredibly difficult because something that’s funny at eight o’clock in the morning is not so funny at five o’clock in the evening after take after take, and it kind of drains you of your soul. As a result I think a lot of people lost sight of the film and lost sight of the script and what it was about. It’s not telling tales out of school, because it’s so long ago, but there was a guy called Lindsay Law who worked for Fox Searchlight. He saw the first edit of the film and said, “Straight to video, I am not spending another penny on this.” So Uberto Pasolini, the producer – who was wonderful, he effectively sacked the director and the editor and brought in a new editor, Nick Moore. He and Nick Moore edited what you saw. It was that close to being nothing, but it became the phenomenon.
The show wants to say something about Britain now. And given your films with Ken Loach, there was a political thread to your career early on. What’s it like being in a social-commentary drama about the UK now that you don’t live there any more?
Well, you know, I go back and forward between Glasgow and Vancouver. As the very beginning of the film says, it’s seven prime ministers later, eight innovation schemes later – has anything changed? And the answer is absolutely not. There’s been, it seems, 150 years of austerity in the UK with Conservative rule, and there’s a scar through the country because of that. And that was one of the reasons I was interested in doing it, because Simon Beaufoy is a wonderful writer. It’s political, but it doesn’t bang it on the head. It makes the point.
I’ve done two films with Ken and a couple of others that were social-commentary films … I enjoy that world. Low-budget independent stuff has always been what I am about. The interesting thing about these eight episodes [is that] back in the 90s, they could have been eight indie films. But we don’t really make those kinds of films any more. I can’t remember the last UK film that focused on a working-class subject.
Is there another 1990s character you want to revive? Hamish Macbeth [the Highlands constable he played in the show of the same name], perhaps?
Ha ha. You’ve got to draw a line somewhere.
The Full Monty, Disney+ from June 14.
