Colin Firth says playing father of Lockerbie victim ’emotionally challenging’
By Hannah Roberts, PA Entertainment Reporter
Colin Firth has said it was “emotionally challenging” to engage with and portray the experiences of a father whose daughter died in the Lockerbie plane bombing.
In a new Sky drama, actor Firth, 64, plays Dr Jim Swire, who has been campaigning for justice since his daughter Flora died when the Pan Am flight 103 was blown out of the sky above Scotland on December 21st 1988.
Dr Swire and his wife Jane, who is played by actress Catherine McCormack in the series, have spearheaded campaigns by bereaved relatives for a full inquiry into the atrocity.
Appearing on ITV show Lorraine, alongside McCormack, Firth said: “The admiration I had for his tenacity, and sympathy as well, because he wouldn’t have chosen this.
“I mean, he wouldn’t have chosen to go on campaigns. He wouldn’t have chosen to take the risk of going to meet Gaddafi. He wouldn’t have chosen to have to keep questioning what he was told.
“And I feel this is something that goes very, very deep. It’s trying to fathom the unfathomable.
“I found that quite emotionally challenging to engage with, really.
“But I think one of the things that that propelled him as well, it wasn’t just tenacity.
“It wasn’t as if ‘I’ve got an answer, that’s not enough, I want more.’ The answers didn’t feel right for him.”
In December 1991, Dr Swire visited then-Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi to try to persuade him to surrender the two Libyan suspects in the bombing.
Firth also said the script had a “huge impact” on him and reflected on the friendships that formed following the tragedy.
“You feel that love was born out of it”, he said.
“I don’t want to sort of try to be glib about the positives, but I’ve been very, very moved about some of those connections between the people in Lockerbie and the people in America.
“There is literally, literally thousands of people with very, very powerful stories to tell.”
Former Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was found guilty of 270 counts of murder by a panel of three Scottish judges, sitting at a special court in the Hague in 2001 and was imprisoned in Scotland.
Al-Megrahi was controversially granted compassionate release in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, returning home to Libya where he died in 2012.
A Libyan suspect of the Lockerbie bombing, Abu Agila Masud, who is alleged to have helped to make the bomb, is to go on trial in the US in May.
Dr Swire told the BBC in December 2022 that he wanted a UN court set up, instead of the case being dealt with by the US or Scotland, and has long wanted the evidence against the only man convicted of the attack to be reassessed.
The new show is based on the book, The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search For Justice by Dr Swire and Peter Biddulph.
Firth won an Academy Award and Bafta for playing George VI in The King’s Speech in 2011 and is known for starring in Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually and Kingsman: The Secret Service, among other films.
Five-part mini-series Lockerbie: A Search For Truth is available on Sky Atlantic and Now.