Other than that, I knew nothing.”īut it wasn’t so much the problems the production encountered that makes its completion seem miraculous. I’d heard about him, just the hearsay and infamy.

“But I went as what I thought he looked like – so I put my hair in a mohican.

“I went as Sid Vicious to a dress-up day at school once,” he says. “They couldn’t work out how to put the receiver back on the cradle.”Įighteen-year-old Partridge tells me he wasn’t entirely sure who Vicious was before he went for the part: had he been fully aware, he might not have auditioned with his mum reading the part of Nancy. “None of them knew what a Trimphone was,” says Boyle, speaking by Zoom. Then there were the specific challenges of working with a cast largely too young to remember the 1990s, let alone the 1970s. There was Covid, of course, and a court case brought by furious frontman John Lydon, AKA Johnny Rotten, to prevent the band’s music being used. Its making was controversial and demanding, too. Photograph: Miya Mizuno/Rebecca Brenneman/FX Lonely boys … (from left) Toby Wallace as Steve Jones, Louis Partridge as Sid Vicious, Anson Boon as John Lydon, Jacob Slater as Paul Cook. It then covers the notoriety that followed, including the band’s messy collapse during a US tour and the horrific aftermath, which culminated in bassist Sid Vicious dying of a heroin overdose while on bail, charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. It is based on Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, Steve Jones’s fantastic, occasionally harrowing autobiography, which takes readers from the guitarist’s horrendous childhood (he was sexually abused by his stepfather) to that infamous, expletive-filled appearance the band made on ITV’s Today show. But Boyle’s is by far the most ambitious. There was Alex Cox’s 1986 movie Sid and Nancy, as well as The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle – a game attempt by the band’s manager Malcolm McLaren to claim the whole thing was a brilliantly orchestrated money-making scheme. “It’s so not the story that everybody wants to be told,” he says, “but it is the story that should be told.” Pistol, a six-part miniseries, certainly isn’t the first drama about the Sex Pistols. D anny Boyle is sitting in his kitchen sounding faintly surprised that his latest project has been made at all.

Pistol johnny rotten