Danny Boyle Tracked Down The Babies From The Original ‘Trainspotting’; Invited Them To A Party
"It was all very funny and disturbing."
If you’ve seen the original Trainspotting, then you know very acutely what the worst scene in the movie is.
More terrible than disgusting toilets and beds full of faeces, is the death of baby Dawn, who dies from neglect while her parent Allison and Sick Boy are lost in a heroin-induced stupor. “Something inside Sick Boy was lost and never returned,” says Renton as Sick Boy cries.
Dawn’s death is also referenced in Trainspotting‘s upcoming sequel, T2. Renton brings up Sick Boy’s dead child, saying: “She was a child, a baby: she would have been a grown woman by now” and director Danny Boyle cuts in original footage from the first film — a choice that then posed a very peculiar problem.
“We thought, ‘Oh god, we better find out what happened to that baby’,” Boyle said in an interview with Joseph Earp on Junkee. “It would be a PR disaster if the baby had died in the meantime or something.”
Boyle ended up finding the two people who played the baby in 1996 on Facebook (“as it is with these times”) and invited them to the wrap party for T2. “They had a great time, walking around saying, ‘[We’re] the dead babies’,” he said. “It was all very funny and disturbing at the same time. But those are the things you cannot predict. They just happen.”
Woah. To discover more of Danny Boyle’s melancholy and morbid thoughts about Trainspotting, read the full interview here.
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T2: Trainspotting is out February 23.