‘She was so terrified’: the harrowing drama about a woman’s six-year ordeal in an Iranian prison | drama

WWhen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in Iran in 2016, it wasn’t immediately clear what happened, but within 100 days, we have the story. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, held a press conference. He had collected 780,000 signatures on a petition for her release, and delivered a letter urging the same to former Prime Minister David Cameron. It later emerged that this happened after vague meetings with the Foreign Office in which civil servants insisted that the best thing, both for Nazanin’s release and the safety of her parents and brother in Iran, was to keep quiet and let diplomacy take its course.

“It was a state hostage-taking,” says Joseph Fiennes, who plays Richard Ratcliffe in the four-part BBC drama Prisoner 951. “It’s clearly still going on, and innocent people and entire families are being disabled and their reputations are tarnished for life. Now that I’ve told this story, I look at anyone who might be accused of something, and I can’t quite believe it.”

Back in July 2016, it was clear that something had gone terribly wrong. Nazanin, a dual citizen, was held in prison on espionage charges and separated from her two-year-old daughter. She was accused of trying to overthrow the Iranian regime, working for MI6, “empowering women” (in one interrogation), and making money illegally. It seemed surreal. She worked for the Reuters news agency – but not even in its newsgathering arm, but for her charity – and had legitimate business in Iran, where she took her daughter to see her parents.

If the indictment seems dodgy to an uneducated audience, it rings even louder alarm bells in the Iranian diaspora, as Narges Rashidi, who plays Nazanin and was born in Khorramabad, Iran (she moved to Germany when she was seven), attests. “We were all fully aware that there was no truth to the made-up reasons they said they detained her.”

But the United Kingdom was fresh out of the European Union, and the day after that letter was sent to Cameron, Theresa May took office as Prime Minister. The news agenda was focused solely on the constitutional chaos, and Boris Johnson suddenly became Foreign Secretary, with disastrous results. Perhaps the most attention the Zaghari-Ratcliffe family received in this period was when Johnson made his outrageous comments the following year, saying that she was “teaching people journalism, as I understand it”, which was not true and gave weight to the Iranian state’s fabricated claims, making its position worse.

Despite all the information and intermittent discussion, which Richard Ratcliffe worked hard to keep alive while Nazanin struggled to maintain her will to live, the human reality of this kidnapping is utterly shocking when we see it brought to life in Prisoner 951. Al-Rashidi, who was in the London gangs, looks like Zaghari-Ratcliffe, it’s uncanny. She says it’s all a testament to her dialect coach: Her real English-speaking accent is mid-Atlantic and she lives in Los Angeles.

Rashidi saw it all: interviews with Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and her reunion with her daughter, but only in a small way. There’s also snapshots available: somehow, the moment of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest at the airport was posted online. “A small portion of the footage, and you didn’t know it was being filmed.”

In the drama, she is on a tightrope, suspended between confidence in her innocence and the uncertainty that if you could be arrested for nothing, who knows where it will end? Knowing what we know now, that she will be in prison for six years, it is very sad to see all of this affect the emotions on her face. Her fight is not to overreact; Its futile attempt to resist the chaos of arbitrary state power. “For me, this is a completely different Nazanin than she was six years later,” Rashidi says. “I saw someone who was very petrified and very soft, not knowing what was happening to her. She found her strength later, after this whole ordeal.”

He says Fiennes “had the honor of sitting down with Richard.” “That doesn’t always happen with the guy you’re playing, who’s a forensic accountant. The persistence, where you get to a place of ‘show me the bloody receipt,’ is in his DNA.” This makes for a painful watch, too, as this lovely establishment man slowly and then quickly loses trust in the things he used to trust: experts, officials, the government, and other establishment people. “He felt that the British government would control it, but that was not the case. He lied to him, lied to him, lied to him.”

Richard Ratcliffe went through five foreign secretaries during his wife’s imprisonment: Johnson, Hunt, Raab, Truss and Cleverley. He and his wife were always the last thing on a minister’s to-do list after they settled into office, and by the time they examined the impasse, their term had expired. In Prisoner 951, it takes Ratcliffe some time to see that “there’s a military-industrial complex at play here,” Fiennes says, “and it’s not transparent. It’s living under government control, and this is a family that’s caught up in that.”

There is a video of Ratcliffe storming into Cleverly’s (then Secretary of State for the Middle East and North Africa) office, “and just shouting at him. He’s really falling apart. He’s rude. He’s on day 18 of the hunger strike, and he’s at rock bottom. But it takes a lot for Richard to get to this place. He doesn’t break free until he’s pushed to the brink.” It’s clear that hunger was messing with his mind, but it’s equally clear that this is an incredible testament to his self-control, and that he didn’t lose it with any of the other four Foreign Ministers.

The separation imposed on the Ratcliffe family, and their separation from their daughter, is painfully depicted in the drama. At one point, Nazanin’s brother holds two mobile phones next to each other, one connected to her in prison and the other to Richard in London, so they can talk to each other for the first time since her arrest. Their attempts to reassure each other, while geopolitics has weakened each other, are painfully poignant. The original working title of Prisoner 951 was “A Love Story”.

“This certainly does not reflect the pain and horror that Nazanin went through,” says Finnis. “It’s not really a love story. But it’s also, in terms of the deep nature of love as a kind of salve, if you like, for survival. I think about Richard’s family, who are very supportive of him, and Nazanin and her family. Her love for her daughter, his love for his daughter, the love they have for each other — all of these elements, in the face of this horrific political situation, have kept them alive.”

Rashidi says she found “their relationship as a couple so extraordinary that, when I was reading it, I was saying to my husband [Christian Straka, a former German tennis pro]“You better fight for me this hard.”

The real reason for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s arrest was public knowledge all along. Richard Ratcliffe started saying it out loud as early as 2018. As explained in Nazanin’s BBC documentary, the Shah of Iran paid for 1,500 Chieftain tanks and other armored vehicles in 1971, but the deal was canceled when his regime fell. The British government did not return the partial payment under the pretext of sanctions. However, in March 2022, Liz Truss announced that the UK would repay nearly £400 million to Iran, and on the same day, Zaghari-Ratcliffe was allowed to return to her home country.

You can imagine another world where this payment was negotiated within a week or a month. You can also imagine a world where you stay in prison forever. “You wonder if there are others who don’t have the visibility, who don’t have a sense of trust, whose families live in Iran and can’t say anything,” says Finnis. “I imagine there are poor souls going through this who have spent decades in prison.”

Fiennes has just finished filming another real-life role: Gareth Southgate, in a TV movie adaptation of the hugely successful play about the English football team, Dear England. Southgate and Richard Ratcliffe look like champions of the tournament, distinguished by their determination and fitness in the face of such different pressures. Fiennes also refers wryly to his stark performance as brutal patriarch Fred Waterford in The Handmaid’s Tale: “Maybe that’s why I gravitate towards Gareth and Richard. I think it’s all part of a catharsis that could go on forever. I mean, it could take the rest of your career trying to get rid of that.”

“Growing up in the diaspora always comes with the guilt of having some freedoms, and not being exposed to some of the struggles that the Iranian people face,” Rashidi says. “So every time I have the opportunity to highlight those struggles, humanize them, and show real people and their real feelings, that’s a gift, and it’s something I feel obligated to do.”