Danny Boyle on 28 Years Later: “It’s About the Mythology We Pass On”

A piece of national theatre so indelible the Guardian called it “the last gasp of liberal Britain” ten years after its broadcast, Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics offered up a vision of Britain that was bold, dynamic, hopeful and diverse, even as the values it celebrated were beginning to fade from view. Jeremy Hunt hated it. So did Toby Young. It was, in other words, an instant classic.

Today, Boyle is back with a film that holds a dark mirror up to that vision. 28 Years Later, a sequel to Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s cult 2002 film 28 Days Later, shows an alternative-timeline Britain marooned by the onslaught of the Rage virus, which laid waste to the country at the turn of the millennium faster than a Liz Truss mini-budget. Like his Olympics jamboree, it’s a piece that examines the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. It’s also Boyle’s best film in years, and the first in a planned trilogy of sequels.

Boyle’s original film was an adrenalised zombie flick that gave us unforgettable images of a young Cillian Murphy roaming the deserted streets of London in his hospital gown. The scenes found eerie new life online during the pandemic, as cities round the world emptied out to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus. “You couldn’t help thinking about it, because when it happened, it was unimaginable that a city could remain exactly the same and yet be transformed overnight,” says Boyle. “They’re just too big and too complicated, aren’t they, to change like that? But then everyone realised it’s true, they really can.”

In the end it was Covid, along with a hefty dose of Brexit and the new political realities it helped usher in, that gave Boyle and his writer on the first film, Alex Garland, fresh impetus to work on a sequel that had long been floated by the pair. (28 Weeks Later, a follow-up directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, was released in 2007, though the new film opts to ignore its timeline of events.) “Alex wrote a script [years ago]; it was a good script but it just didn’t get any traction between us,” says the director. “It was very much a ‘weaponise the virus’-type idea, and it felt generic to us. Then after Covid he went away and started to write this much bigger idea, with all this stuff in it that you’re not really supposed to do. You know, like maybe you’d expect the virus to be spreading into Europe, but this did the opposite. It was counterintuitive. It went, no, they pushed it back from Europe and isolated the island, just like Britain has chosen its own isolation politically. And now it’s 28 years later. It’s 28 years, what’s happened?”

What happened, for the principals of the film, is that one group of survivors sought refuge on the island of Lindisfarne in Northumbria, where they built a walled community closed off from the mainland by a causeway only accessible at low tide. Forced to abandon the trappings of modernity by their isolation, the islanders have built a new cultural mythology plundered from half-remembered bits of Britain’s past: the Queen, the Battle of Agincourt, the keep-calm-and-carry-on spirit of the Blitz. It’s an idea the film seizes on brilliantly in a series of montages, setting scenes from old movies and wartime footage to the metronomic pulse of Boots, a 1915 recording of a Rudyard Kipling poem about the hell of long-haul marches during the Boer War.

“It’s about the mythology we pass on. They create this Henry V-type mythology because the bow and arrow has a great place in British history, but it gets distorted as it’s passed on. And so you get this kind of montage of misremembered half-truths and instincts that emerges,” says Boyle. Our own culture’s urge to look back lends appealing shade and texture to the film, which opens on a Teletubbies episode that becomes the scene of a terrible childhood trauma for one character. “You start to think realistically, if you no longer have what we call progress, our general move forward in sophistication or understanding, do you keep advancing? I don’t know whether you do. So you go, well, here’s a community. That’s what was taken away 28 years ago. What have they done in the meantime? And what they’re doing is they’re looking backwards.”

To sustain their community, the islanders must make periodic sallies onto the mainland to gather wood and other provisions. One alarming tradition – oddly reminiscent of early-pandemic trips to the supermarket – sees young boys make their first crossing as a rite of passage, armed only with a bow and arrow – and here’s where our lead character, 14-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams), comes in.

Spike lives at home with dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who dispatches the infected with the same relish he tucks into his bacon and burnt-egg breakfasts, and mum Isla (Jodie Comer), who is bedbound and suffering from an unknown ailment which leaves her locked inside her memories. Spike narrowly survives his first trip to the mainland, where the virus has evolved to create terrifying new monsters, and learns of a former GP living out in the wilds who may be able to help find a cure for his mum. Jamie warns him away from the man, saying he’s insane, but of course Spike doesn’t listen, and soon slips out the gate with his mum to meet Dr Kelson, played by Ralph Fiennes daubed head-to-toe in iodine. Kelson, it turns out, has found a new calling post-pandemic making a terrifying sculpture out of human skulls, but in truth he’s less Colonel Kurtz, more Professor Chris Whitty. “What I connected [the sculpture] with was the Covid memorial wall opposite parliament,” says Boyle. “You look at that and you think, Oh, my God. It’s so moving how people wanted to say, ‘No, this person was here and he was loved, and he’s gone now, and it wasn’t his fault, and nobody’s trying to blame anybody. I just want to acknowledge that it mattered just for a moment.’ I think that’s a really beautiful thing.”

Boyle, a poet laureate of popular cinema, has a knack for tapping resonant frequencies like these. The film is bookended by scenes that trail the arrival of a new character, a demonic cult leader (Jack O’Connell) who will feature heavily in the sequel, shot concurrently with this one by director Nia DaCosta. That film will also herald the return of Cillian Murphy to the franchise, whose character, Jim, Boyle says, is central to the third part of the trilogy. But 28 Years Later is very much Spike’s story, and in the end, it’s the warped humanist vision, the insistence on fellowship, that places the film among the top tier of his work. (Though the zombies certainly don’t hurt.)

Among the signs and symbols of the past that litter the islanders’ lives in the film sits a picture of the queen in her youthful prime, the image of an order that’s long since come to pass. I ask Boyle how he felt, as an avowed republican who famously turned down the offer of a knighthood, about her death in 2022. He laughs at the sneakiness of the question. “I think she would take her place in Kelson’s memorial just like everyone else. Ultimately, that’s where we all belong.”

28 Years Later is out in UK cinemas now.