EXCLUSIVE: Narges Rashidi (Gangs of London, The Girlfriend Expertise) and Joseph Fiennes (The Handmaid’s Story, Shakespeare in Love) are the actors who’ve been secretly portraying Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian charity employee falsely accused of spying and detained in Iran for six years, and her husband Richard Ratcliffe, who campaigned tirelessly for her launch, in a TV drama, Deadline can reveal.
Earlier this month, my Deadline colleagues Jake Kanter and Max Goldbart broke the news that the BBC had commissioned the factual drama primarily based on the chilling real-life story of Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Richard Ratcliffe.
The actors have been taking pictures the four-part BBC factual drama beneath wraps for the previous three weeks on areas within the west of England and in Europe.
Due to the story’s sensitivity, BAFTA-winning director Philippa Lowthorpe has been filming in opposition to a backdrop of strict secrecy.
Lowthorpe’s manufacturing, made by Fremantle-backed Dancing Ledge Productions, has been tailored from A Yard of Sky: A Story of Love, Resistance and Hope, which Zaghari-Ratcliffe co-wrote together with her husband. The memoir will by printed within the UK this fall by the Penguin Random Home imprint Chatto & Windus.
Zaghari-Radcliffe’s ordeal started on April 3 2016, when she and her then-22-month-old child daughter Gabriella have been about to board a flight at Tehran’s airport to London after visiting her mother and father.
Her toddler youngster was cruelly snatched away from her, and Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested by the Iran Revolutionary Guard secret service. She was accused of main “a foreign-linked hostile community.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe has constantly denied the allegations made in opposition to her. She was to spend the following six terrifying years held hostage in jail. Throughout that point, her associate forcefully petitioned 5 consecutive UK Overseas Secretaries together with Boris Johnson, who later would change into Prime Minister, as would Liz Truss, the Overseas Secretary who ultimately negotiated Zaghari-Radcliffe’s launch in March 2022.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband Richard Ratcliffe in 2022 (Getty Photographs)
Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Photographs
In 2017, Johnson, as Overseas Secretary, made a deceptive assertion to lawmakers within the Home of Commons that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been “merely instructing individuals journalism” in Iran — a remark that her household and employers on the Thomson Reuters Basis, the place she had been a charity venture coordinator, each insisted was false.
Later, after her launch, Zaghari-Ratcliffe advised Johnson, by then Prime Minister, that his incorrect phrases have been used in opposition to her consistently, and that her interrogators tormented her, insisting that her personal Overseas Secretary knew she was responsible, based on an essay written for The Guardian by Tulip Siddiq, a member of Parliament in whose NW London constituency the couple dwell and in addition was current on the assembly.
Siddiq additionally wrote that Zaghari-Ratcliffe advised Johnson of a few of what she had been subjected to throughout incarceration: Guards threatened they might kill her and bury her and mentioned she would by no means see her daughter once more, and the solitary-confinement room set off her claustrophobia. “For those who ripped my pores and skin off, you’d see the deep scars on my soul,” she advised Johnson, based on Siddiq’s account.
The four-hour drama sequence will discover all that Zaghari-Ratcliffe endured in Tehran and the monumental efforts of her husband and others again house to safe her freedom.
When his spouse went on starvation strike in jail over in London, Ratcliffe shadowed her by additionally staging a starvation strike exterior the UK Overseas Workplace in Whitehall, London. He additionally disclosed that Zaghari-Ratcliffe actually was being held so as to power the UK into settling a multimillion-dollar dispute, courting again to the Nineteen Seventies, wherein Iran mentioned the UK owed greater than $500M on account of a canceled order for 1,500 Chieftain tanks.
Fiennes lately gained approval for his portrayal of England males’s soccer staff supervisor Gareth Southgate in James Graham’s Olivier Award-winning play Pricey England. The Nationwide Theatre manufacturing directed by Rupert Goold is within the strategy of being tailored right into a four-part drama for the BBC by Left Financial institution Photos.
Graham and Goold have been in Germany in the course of the Euros match on a fact-finding mission for the TV present.
Iranian-born Rashidi, who was raised in Germany, has appeared in two seasons of Gangs of London and has filmed a 3rd.
