Prisoner 951 writer reveals why Boris Johnson wasn't cast with "buffoon" performance in Zaghari-Ratcliffe drama

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Among the myriad delicate, difficult and perplexing questions that Stephen Butchard had to ask himself while writing Prisoner 951, was whether or not to feature Boris Johnson. As Foreign Secretary, Johnson played a pivotal part in the story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was detained and imprisoned by Iran for six years from 2016, and her husband Richard, who kept her name in the news in the UK by any means he could, including going on hunger strike.

In November 2017, Johnson incorrectly told a Foreign Affairs Select Committee that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was in Iran “simply teaching people journalism” and although immediately refuted (she was visiting relatives), the Iranian authorities claimed that Johnson’s blunder was proof that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was engaged in propaganda against the regime.

Undoubtedly, Johnson’s remarks endangered Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case, increased risk for her in detention and raised the spectre of Iran adding years to her sentence. When, in 2022, she met Johnson after her release, Zaghari-Ratcliffe told the then prime minister that she had “lived in the shadow” of his words for the past four and a half years. So Butchard couldn’t ignore the part that Johnson played. But casting someone to play him could become a distracting sideshow that both pulled focus and changed the timbre of the drama.

“I decided we shouldn’t have an actor,” Butchard says. “Boris Johnson is almost a caricature himself, and if you bring in an actor to play that caricature, you get a buffoon. You might want to do it, but it wouldn’t be truthful.” Instead, Butchard opted for a smarter solution: he cast Johnson as himself.

“You look for archive footage – from the news, say – and you play what he said off other characters.” This choice is informed by, and informs, answers to other questions that are fundamental to the nature of Prisoner 951 and the story that Butchard, director Philippa Lowthorpe and actors Joseph Fiennes and Narges Rashidi wanted to tell.

“It’s a political thriller that has, at the heart of it, a love story,” says Lowthorpe, who began her career making documentaries before directing dramas such as Five Daughters, about the murder of five sex workers in Ipswich in 2006, which was co-written by Butchard. “This is a story about an ordinary couple getting caught up in geopolitics beyond their interest, beyond their lives, and catapulted into a Kafkaesque nightmare because one of them is in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“We had a working title of Love Story because that’s what this story is,” says Joseph Fiennes, who plays Richard. “It’s about Nazanin and Richard’s love for each other, the love of a mother and father for their child, and the love within the family and the families, who kept their daughter and their son-in-law on track.”

Narges Rashidi, who plays Nazanin, parses the point: “It’s a political drama, about real people who are not political being politicised.” For her, it boils down to “a woman being punished for something she’s not responsible for, a man trying to get his family back, and a little child’s trauma.”

When she was detained, Zaghari-Ratcliffe had her 22-month-old daughter Gabriella with her. Gabriella was eventually placed in the custody of her maternal grandparents in Iran, so she could visit her mother in prison. When she returned to the UK to start school, she needed a translator to speak to her father because she couldn’t speak English. Prisoner 951 is full of heartbreaking details like this as it establishes what Lowthorpe calls the “incredible humanity and relatability of Richard and Nazanin and each of their families”.

If Prisoner 951 – which is based on A Yard of Sky, Nazanin and Richard’s soon-to-be published book – is partly a love story, that begs another question: how do you demonstrate that love when the couple are 3,000 miles apart? After all, one of drama’s key tenets is “show, don’t tell”.

“Stephen brilliantly begins with the phone call that signalled the beginning of Nazanin and Richard’s nightmare,” say Lowthorpe, “but it was really important to show their past. So I created these little scenes like a family album – of their weddings, in Iran and in the UK, and of them with their daughter. I’ve used that motif in all of the episodes and shown different little bits of their snapshots and their coupleness that anybody can relate to. Little glimpses of them together before they’re wrenched apart; then you know what they’re fighting for.”

Believing in that love means believing in the characters who, let’s not forget, are real people. Which brings us to Fiennes’ and Rashidi’s contributions – their performances. How did they approach the roles?

“You start at the point of being fairly forensic with the way they are physically, how they carry themselves, how they conduct themselves,” says Fiennes, who has form playing real people, having received rave reviews for his performance as Gareth Southgate in James Graham’s Dear England at the National Theatre.

“You watch interviews with them, but interviews are artificial situations so it’s sometimes helpful to talk to someone who knows them rather than the person themselves. With Richard, he was very accessible. I spent hours in his company getting a sense of his essence, his spirit and his vital intelligence. Then it’s about me trying to calibrate all of that into the character.”

Rashidi read everything she could find, watched every interview and pored over the documentary about the couple’s plight. And she read half of A Yard of Sky – the half written by Nazanin. “Philippa didn’t want me to have Richard’s perspective, because Nazanin didn’t,” she explains. “So I went into it subjectively, which was really useful.” Rashidi speaks for herself and, I think, for Fiennes when she says of the research and preparation: “Beyond that, there’s no more you can do. You ask questions, you give it your all and pray to God that it will happen.”

For Butchard, these questions were asked and answered in pursuit of one thing: the truth. “There’s a difference between the facts and the truth. Something can be truthful without being an absolute fact, but you have to be truthful because otherwise it damages the credibility of the story.”

And is that as true of fictional characters as it is of characters based on real people? “I always follow a truthful path, because the minute that a character does something that you don’t quite believe, it becomes melodrama and I switch off. I’m writing series two of This City Is Ours at the moment, so I think about this every day.” And the truths at the heart of Prisoner 951? That hope is an act of resistance, and in March 2022, the British government repaid to Iran a debt of nearly £400m that had been owed since 1979. The next day, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released.

I ask Rashidi what scenes were the most difficult to film. “What weren’t the most difficult scenes to film?” she says. “Usually, you have three emotional scenes to play in an hour-long drama. With this, we’re telling the highlights of six years of an odyssey, so it felt like we had eight emotional scenes every day. That isn’t just tiring, it’s draining.”

How do you put down such an affecting experience in order to not just pick up the next thing but to get on with life? “I don’t think you can – and I think you mustn’t,” says Lowthorpe. “As a director, you have to unzip yourself, bear your heart, bear witness to the power of the thing. Because if you’re not doing that and you’re distancing yourself, the audience will feel the distance. So you have to live with being a bit sad and then remember that it’s not your life.”

And for Rashidi, there was extra resonance. “I was born in Iran and left when I was very little, but obviously so much of my being is Iranian. A lot of that came up with this job. Even speaking the language, a lot is relived. But what helped me separate myself from the character was knowing that yes, it is draining and emotional to go through it for four months, but I got to go home every night, sleep in a warm bed, eat warm food. This is a true story that happened to a real person who went through it for six years and is still dealing with the consequences.”

“You never really shake the story,” Fiennes says. “It might fall into a recess in your mind as you become engaged with something more novel or get engaged with the present, but every character I have played is somehow part of my DNA. Because you live it, breathe it, love it and no matter the character, their struggle or their story, something grows beyond the struggle that might even amount to some kind of celebration. Out of the mud, arises the lily.”

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Prisoner 951 will air on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from Sunday 23rd November 2025.

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