You’ll know Robert Carlyle for many things – getting his kit off in The Full Monty, being skewered through the heart with a plutonium rod as Bond villain Renard in The World Is Not Enough, playing Sherlock Holmes in Watson, joining Line of Duty as a gruff specialist firearms officer, and appearing opposite David Tennant and Toby Jones in ITV’s The Hack.
He also appeared as Adolf Hitler in Hitler: The Rise of Evil and (uncredited) as John Lennon in Yesterday; as a cannibalistic soldier in Ravenous; Rumplestiltskin in Once Upon a Time; and the British prime minister in Cobra. But it’s hard to ever fully dissociate him from the fantastic moustache he sports as violent, pint-swilling psychopath Francis Begbie in Trainspotting – a moustache that is now, unbelievably, 30 years old and heading back to cinemas in a new 4K restoration from 21 August.
But for the purposes of our next readers’ interview, we are also interested in Carlyle behind the camera. More than a decade after directing and starring in 2015 black comedy The Legend of Barney Thomson, alongside Emma Thompson, Ray Winstone and Ashley Jensen, he has returned to the director’s chair with a new short film, Three – a darkly funny, increasingly unsettling three-hander about sex, class, power and three people trying to work out exactly who is using whom. The film has its European premiere at the Edinburgh international film festival on Friday and screens again on Sunday.
So, what to ask him? Does Begbie’s moustache deserve its own 30th-anniversary interview? Has playing Sherlock Holmes made him any better at Cluedo? Can he still drive a double-decker bus, like he does in Ken Loach’s Carla’s Song? What happened to his Saturday Tunes, where he used to recommend new bands every week on Twitter? Did he have the two teeth put back in that he had removed to bring Begbie back for T2 Trainspotting? And what does it feel like to stomp through the countryside as a giant, as he does in the video for Oasis’s Little By Little?
Post your questions below by 6pm on Wednesday 19 August and we’ll print his answers as part of our readers’ interview series.
• Three screens as part of the Edinburgh international film festival’s Out of Competition Shorts at 2pm on Friday 14 August at Cameo and at 2pm on Sunday 16 August at Cineworld.
