TRAINSPOTTING director Danny Boyle has revealed the long-awaited sequel is going to tackle “manhood and disappointed masculinity”.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker has disclosed it will “unfreeze” the characters from the first film and deal equally with what they have been doing for the past 20 years.

Ahead of the world premiere of T2 in Edinburgh, Boyle said it would also look at the “terrifying” process of ageing.

Screenwriter John Hodge, who adapted Irvine Welsh’s bestseller for the 1996 original, said the new movie would also look at how corporations have become more powerful over the past two decades.

He said the film had become “more topical” since Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller and Ewen Bremner agreed to reunite for a sequel.

T2 will follow events after McGregor’s character Renton returns to Edinburgh for the first time in 20 years since betraying his friends by stealing £16,000.

Boyle said: “In practice, I knew if the script didn’t deal with them equally, like the first one, they wouldn’t do it. So then we had to come up with a movie that did that and also wasn’t bad.

“Then there’s the prism of ageing, which is terrifying for a lot of us but really terrifying for actors. You remember them frozen in time and suddenly they’re in the present.

“When we first started making this film, I thought the subject was time. And that the reason we didn’t make it 10 years ago is because the actors didn’t look like they’d aged enough. Or I wasn’t old enough.

“I realised after making this film it isn’t about time, it’s about masculinity, about disappointed masculinity. When we made the first film, everyone said it was about drugs, and I said it was about friendship. But I realise now it was really about boyhood. And this is about manhood.”