The Long Shadow's Daniel Mays opens up on meeting real-life victim's son
Mays met Neil Jackson, the son of his character Sydney Jackson and Emily Jackson, who was murdered by Peter Sutcliffe.
ITV drama The Long Shadow dramatises the five-year hunt for serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, and does so by following both the police investigating Sutcliffe's murders and the victims and their families.
In the series, Katherine Kelly and Daniel Mays play Emily and Sydney Jackson, while Shaun Thomas plays their eldest son Neil. Emily was Sutcliffe's second murder victim.
Kelly and Mays spoke with RadioTimes.com and other press about the series, and Mays explained that in preparation for his role he went to meet the real Neil Jackson.
"I went to go meet him, I had a sort of hour-long conversation with him up in Leeds, which was something I really wanted to do," Mays explained. "I’d done that in the past with playing real characters - if you can just somehow talk to their relatives or people that are involved in the story, it just cements it in your own brain really and gives you a way in."
Mays said that he "did have a bit of a wobble" before meeting Jackson, saying that he was thinking: "'Why have I asked him do this?' Because how do you broach the subject?"
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He continued: "But Neil was just amazing, and he brought two photographs of Emily that he keeps on the wall in his house, and he would show me that, and he was just really open and spoke really beautifully about this unimaginable experience he'd gone through, this life-changing experience. So I had so much respect for him after meeting him, he was an amazing guy."
Meanwhile, Kelly said of Neil: "He’s written a book called After Evil that he co-wrote with a criminologist, which I found very helpful because he holds nothing back in that book, about learning that his mum was a sex worker from the six o'clock news. That's the first he'd heard of it. And I feel like he's been shouting for a long time about this but there's been nobody listening.
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"And we got a message saying that he's seen it and he gives it his blessing. And obviously it's a hard thing to watch and it's a hard thing to praise because the language always seems inappropriate when you're talking about this, but he does feel like we've done justice to his story."
The show comes from writer George Kay (Litvinenko), who previously revealed that he and his team changed the title of the drama from The Yorkshire Ripper, after they found out that Sutcliffe's victims' families found the moniker, which was applied to Sutcliffe before he was caught, "disrespectful".
The Long Shadow will air on ITV1 and ITVX from 25th September 2023. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on.
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