From Nick Roddick interview with RC:
"Danny Boyle approached me and asked me to play Begbie. I wasnae too sure at the beginning, because I knew the book very well, and I saw Begbie as this huge monster, you know? . . . If you take Begbie as he is in the book, I would say the character would possibly be unplayable. The audience would be turned off by the guy. You couldn't possibly watch it for that amount of time. But, the way I'd seen the script going, the first half hour of the film is actually quite funny. So what I wanted was to create a sort of cartoon caricature of a Glasgow hard man - well, actually an Edinburgh hard man, because Begbie's from Leith.So at the beginning, there he is in his pink Pringle jersey and his red stay-pressed trousers and his moustache. Then as the film progresses - the crucial point of course is when the baby dies - it gets quite dark. So the clothes become darker, the Pringle becomes black, the suit goes on. And by the end, you're left in no doubt whatsoever that the guy isn't funny at all, that he's actually extremely dangerous and probably insane."
Time Out, March 13-20 1996:
Carlyle's volatile characters are most likely to stick in the mind. There was Nosty, dreadlocked and homeless, who lacerated his own chest with broken beer bottles in Antonia Bird's Safe. Albie the scouser pushed over the edge after his father's death in Cracker; Franco Begbie for whom violence is an everyday activity. "These are the parts that any actor wants to play. The difficulty is to differentiate beetween them - they're all crazy, but in different ways. Begbie's more of a gregarious crazy person, as opposed to a character like Albie, where it's coming very much from inside him." Begbie differed in another way too: "That was the first time in my whole career that I've been surprised with the final result, especially the scene in the pub at the end. There's something in the eyes which I didn't know was there on the day." Carlyle laughs, bemused. "Fucking worrying, really." Radio Times, around August 1997:"I've met loads of Begbies in my time. Wander round Glasgow on a Saturday night and you've a good chance of running into Begbie. It was very easy for me to relate to the world of the film. The estate I was brought up on in Glasgow was the Glaswegian equivalent of Leith. A lot of guys from my generation - some of my friends - got involved in the drug scene.""Trainspotting was one of the finest anti-drug films ever made. It is difficult for me to comment on the violence. Begbie exists - he's alive and well all over the country, and I've met him. I grew up with that, although I was never prone to violence myself. To ignore him is self-censorship, which is not the way forward."
From Neon article, February 1998:
"Danny [Boyle] was very keen to get a kind of homosexual Ian Rush look with Begbie's costume. I wasn't sure about it at first. but it was absolutely there that this guy was deeply, deeply repressed, and you couldn't even talk about how he would ever begin to release that. The scene where he picks up the transvestite in a nightclub was much longer in the original cut. Begbie moves to hit the guy, but pulls back because he recognises something deeper. A lot of the finer character details - particularly with Begbie and Spud - were cut back in the final version.""It is surprising how scary I seem to be. Because I don't think I'm like that at all. Being aggressive isn't difficult - all young actors love shouting, but it's generally sound and fury signifying nothing. The trick to being frightening is to hold it back until you need it."
HQ Sept/Oct 1996:
"Begbie isn't meant to be real, he's meant to be a heightened version of reality. Your worst fuckin' nightmare. . .Begbie's disgustin', Renton's disgustin', they all are. There's nothing nice about those people."HQ Sept/Oct 1996. And from Danny Boyle (director):
When we were doing the scene where Begbie goes berserk in the London pub, for lighting reasons I had to shoot the extras first and get their frightened reactions. They were terrible. I couldn't frighten them enough. Bobby just said, "Let me do my bit first - and then film them." So we did. And they were absolutely terrified. It was perfect."
