Joseph Fiennes, Narges Rashidi Star In BBC Drama About Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe

EXCLUSIVE: Narges Rashadi (Gangs of London, The Girlfriend Experience) and Joseph Fiennes (The Handmaid’s Tale, Shakespeare in Love) have been secretly portraying Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian charity worker falsely accused of spying and detained in Iran for six years, and her husband Richard Ratcliffe, who campaigned tirelessly for her release, in a TV drama, Deadline can reveal.

The actors have been shooting the four-part BBC factual drama under wraps for the past three weeks on locations in the west of England and in Europe. 

Because of the story’s sensitivity, BAFTA-winning director Philippa Lowthorpe has been filming against a backdrop of strict secrecy and security.

Lowthorpe’s production, made by Fremantle-backed Dancing Ledge Productions, has been adapted from A Yard of Sky: A Story of Love, Resistance and Hope, which Zaghari-Ratcliffe co-wrote with her husband.

The memoir will by published in the UK this fall by the Penguin Random House imprint Chatto & Windus.

Zachari-Radcliffe’s ordeal began on April 3, 2016, when she and her then-22-month-old baby daughter Gabriella were about to board a flight at Tehran’s airport for a flight home to London after visiting her parents.

Her infant child cruelly was snatched away from her, and Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested by the Iran Revolutionary Guard secret service. She was accused of leading “a foreign-linked hostile network.”

Zaghari-Ratcliffe has consistently denied the allegations made against her.

She was to spend the next six terrifying years held hostage in prison.

During that time, her partner forcefully petitioned five consecutive UK Foreign Secretaries including Boris Johnson, who later would become Prime Minister, as would Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary who eventually negotiated Zaghari-Radcliffe’s release in March 2022.

In 2017, Johnson, as Foreign Secretary, made a misleading statement to lawmakers in the House of Commons that Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been “simply teaching people journalism” in Iran — a comment that her family and employers at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, where she had been a charity project coordinator, both insisted was false. 

Later, after her release, Zachariah-Ratcliffe told Johnson, by then Prime Minister, that his incorrect words constantly were used against her, that her interrogators tormented her, insisting that her own Foreign Secretary knew she was guilty, according to an essay written for The Guardian by Tulip Saddiq, a member of Parliament in whose NW London constituency the couple live and also was present at the meeting.

Saddiq also wrote that Zaghari-Ratcliffe told Johnson of some of what she had been subjected to during incarceration: Guards threatened they would kill her and bury her and said she would never see her daughter again, and the solitary-confinement room set off her claustrophobia. “If you ripped my skin off, you would see the deep scars on my soul,” she told Johnson, according to Saddiq’s account.

The four-hour drama series will explore all that Zaghari-Ratcliffe endured in Tehran and the monumental efforts of her husband and others back home to secure her freedom.

When his wife went on hunger strike in jail over in London, Ratcliffe shadowed her by also staging a hunger strike outside the UK Foreign Office in Whitehall, London. He also disclosed that Zaghari-Ratcliffe really was being held in order to force the UK into settling a multimillion-dollar dispute, dating back to the 1970s, in which Iran said the UK owed more than $500M as a result of a canceled order for 1,500 Chieftain tanks.

Earlier this month, my Deadline colleagues Jake Kanter and Max Goldbart broke the news that the BBC had commissioned the factual drama based on the chilling real-life story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Richard Ratcliffe.

Fiennes recently won acclaim for his portrayal of England men’s football team manager Gareth Southgate in James Graham’s Olivier Award-winning play Dear England. The National Theatre production directed by Rupert Goold is in the process of being adapted into a four-part drama for the BBC by Left Bank Pictures. 

Graham and Goold have been in Germany during the Euros tournament on a fact-finding mission for the TV show.

Iranian-born Rashadi, who was raised in Germany, has appeared in two seasons of Gangs of London and has filmed a third.