Ewan McGregor has confirmed his willingness to star in Danny Boyle's planned sequel to the cult 1996 film Trainspotting.

Speaking at a Q&A session following a reunion screening of Trainspotting in London, McGregor said it would be an "extraordinary experience" to reprise the role of Mark Renton, which made his name. Boyle revealed in March that he is planning a sequel that could find its way to the big screen for 2016, the 20th anniversary of the cult film about Edinburgh drug addicts. It will be based loosely on the book Porno by Irvine Welsh, in which the Trainspotting author imagined Renton, Sickboy, Begbie and Spud becoming embroiled in a scheme to raise cash by making a pornographic movie many years after the events of the earlier book.

"It's funny – Irvine Welsh's novel, Porno, is set 10 years after Trainspotting, but I wasn't ready to do it then, for lots of reasons," McGregor said, in comments reported on the Time Out website. "But now there's talk of it happening in a few years' time, and I'm totally up for it. I'd be so chuffed to be back on set with everybody and I think it would be an extraordinary experience."

McGregor's comments suggest he has forgiven Boyle after the pair fell out over casting for the 2000 film The Beach. The Oscar-winning director of Slumdog Millionaire revealed in March that he had apologised to the star of his first three films, Trainspotting, Shallow Grave and A Life Less Ordinary, for replacing him with Leonardo DiCaprio for his adaptation of Alex Garland's cult backpacker novel.

"You learn and we've apologised," Boyle told Jonathan Ross. "We made this film called The Beach, and we gave Ewan the impression we were going to cast him in it and we didn't cast him in it, we cast another actor, a wonderful actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who was a lovely guy, they're both wonderful.

"You think you're moving up, it's the illusion that you think you're moving up, therefore you're going to need a bigger star to sell the movie. You learn to stick with your roots."

As well as McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller and Ewan Bremner would all be expected to return for the sequel, reprising their roles as the ultra-violent Begbie, the cynical Sickboy and the hapless Spud respectively. Welsh's novel also features Diane Coulston, played in Trainspotting by Kelly Macdonald.