As you might have gathered by now, the Trainspotting gang is back. Director Danny Boyle has got the lads together again for T2 Trainspotting, another blackly comic episode of japes and scrapes in Edinburgh.
20 years since he nicked £16,000, leaving his pals high and dry in the aftermath of a big-time drug deal, Renton (Ewan McGregor) returns to his hometown, where it’s not long before he finds himself getting drawn back into the kinds of misadventures he once enjoyed with childhood pals Sick Boy (Johnny Lee Miller), Spud (Ewen Bremner) and Begbie (Robert Carlyle). This means agreeing to fund a brothel run by Sick Boy and his girlfriend Veronika, played by 25-year-old newcomer Anjela Nedyalkova.
We know what you’re thinking. Who is Anjela Nedyalkova when she’s at home? Here’s what we know about the Bulgarian actor who’s injected fresh blood into Danny Boyle’s new narrative.
She’s only a had a handful of film roles before
All made in her home country. There was Avé, a 2011 drama about two teenage hitchhikers, and Bulgarian Rhapsody, a 2014 war-time drama about a love triangle. Most recently, she starred in 2015’s arty The Paradise Suite, in which she played a young model duped into the sex trade.
She’s a film school drop-out
Nedyalkova began to study film directing at National Film Academy in Sofia, but didn’t graduate. Choose the university of life, mate.
She held her own on-set
Her co–stars may be established famouses, but that didn’t intimidate the relatively Nedyalkova. She told film website Hey You Guys that she figured she wouldn’t have been cast if she wasn’t good enough: “I decided to trust Danny… He knows what he’s doing.” Of Boyle’s importance to T2 Trainspotting, she added, “He is the battery of the whole thing; he is the charger. Without him I don’t think it would happen – or that it would happen in that good a way.”
She’s into slacklining
You know, slacklining. It’s like tightrope walking, except the line is slacker. Anyway, Nedyalkova was enjoying a bit of slacklining in an Edinburgh park called The Meadows on her day off from shooting. Boyle happened to bump into her as he was also having a day off. “Anjela as well as being an extraordinary actress is also what is called a slackliner,” he told The Sun in no uncertain terms. “She is the most amazing slackliner I have seen.” Danny Boyle has seen a few things, and those things probably include a fair few slackliners, so you’d better believe this is high praise indeed.
She made the T2 Trainspotting trailer go viral in Bulgaria
Because fans were so excited to see a relatively unknown actor from their home country cast in such a massive film. Apparently, some Bulgarians were also excited to see a pot of rose-hip jam – a popular Communist-era treat – in the shot where Veronika is all post-coital with Renton, as – like T2 Trainspotting – it brought the past flooding back.
She likes The Prodigy
Speaking to public-republic.com to promote Avé in 2011, Nedyalkova revealed that she had attended the Spirit of Burgas Festival in the Bulgarian city of Burgas, where she had enjoyed a performance from the firestarters, the twisted firestarters. “The Prodigy ruled!” she said. The Essex Ravers remixed Iggy Pop’s iconic ‘Lust For Life’ for the T2 Trainspotting soundtrack, which must have pleased Nedyalkova.
She’s bloody great in T2 Trainspotting
Veronika makes Renton and Sick Boy dance to her tune and plays a vital role in Spud’s development. We won’t spoil it here but the latter is a plot development you certainly won’t see coming. The film is released this Friday (2017), so be sure to inject it right into your eyeballs.