Danny Boyle still feels guilty for casting Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘The Beach’ over Ewan McGregor.
The pair fell out over the 2000 movie, despite a previously close friendship, and although they are on good terms now and working on a new ‘Trainspotting’ movie together, Danny admitted he had treated his friend badly.
He told Empire: "We weren’t particularly respectful towards him, way back in the day. But he’s always been very, very generous. So we met and talked and I said how sorry I was, the way we had treated him. And it rebuilt from there."
And Ewan insisted their friendship and working relationship has come full circle.
He said: "I hadn’t seen Danny for all those years. He f****d off, and I f*****d off. I haven’t lived in Scotland since I was 17.
"He’s coming back, I was coming back. There were an awful lot of parallels you might say."
Meanwhile, Ewan previously admitted he was hurt when Danny opted for Leonardo over him for ‘The Beach’,
He said: "I felt at that time that as an actor I was part of the new wave of something. I was lucky to be Danny’s actor, and I felt part of something that was bigger than all our careers with ‘Shallow Grave’ and ‘Trainspotting’ less so, perhaps, with ‘A Life Less Ordinary’. I felt we’d left our mark on British cinema.
"So when we were approaching ‘The Beach’, I thought I was playing that role and I was encouraged to think so; I was told for many months I would be doing it; and then I was told I wouldn’t. And I was mystified and it had been handled badly, and whatever. But it hurt me very much at the time. I was rocked a bit, and my confidence was dented. And I didn’t quite understand why they went down that path when I thought we were about something else. I understood when it came down to dollars. But it was a Hollywood version of something we weren’t really about."
Danny Boyle’s guilt over Ewan McGregor snub
