Ewen Bremner: 'They should let Irvine Welsh script the Tiger King movie'

I live in Harlem in New York and I’m quarantined on my own. The streets are very calm. As an actor I’m quite adapted to waiting around on set and between jobs, so I’m not letting the downtime cave my head in.

I haven’t owned a television for 25 years. I found myself in hotel rooms scrolling through the channels until four in the morning – I had to cut it off. I’ve got Netflix, so I did watch Tiger King. It’s even more Irvine Welsh than Irvine Welsh. Irvine writes these trashy, heightened stories. The Tiger King characters are just as vain. They’re all prepared to use skulduggery to become the star. The cats are like a narcotic substance – everyone melts around them. I loved the fantastical-ness. They should let Irvine script the movie.

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I’ve also got the Criterion Channel. I watched David Holzman’s Diary, which is a fake documentary from the 1960s. It’s a bit like Man Bites Dog but better. I’ve been watching a lot of movies from that era. I watched Rififi, the French diamond heist gang movie, and Bay of Angels, this Jacques Demy movie about gamblers in France in the 60s. I’m also watching a lot of the Prelinger Archives from archive.org. They have around 80,000 films that are now in the public domain. I’ve watched an evangelical Mormon film from the 1950s that was set out to dissuade teenagers from drinking beer. I’ve seen an amazing documentary from the 40s about psychiatric disorders. The patients had to wear white bandages around their eyes. It’s graphically bewildering.

I’m in Snowpiercer, which Bong Joon-ho directed before Parasite. It never got a release in the UK. Harvey Weinstein bought the distribution rights, but there was an online outcry that Weinstein was going to edit some of Bong Joon-ho’s masterwork, and Weinstein took a huff. It’s got an amazing cast: Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Ed Harris, and Captain America, Chris Evans. It’s set on a futuristic train that must never stop. It’s the same themes as Parasite, but more fantastical. Do a double bill with Parasite and see how they stack up.

• Snowpiercer is on Blu-ray and DVD from 25 May.