When dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was imprisoned, her husband went on hunger strike – to force Britain to act. Narges Rashidi and Joseph Fiennes reveal how they brought their nightmare to the small screen
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hen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested in Iran in 2016, it wasn’t immediately obvious what had happened – but within 100 days, we had the contours of the story. Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, held a press conference. He had amassed 780,000 signatures on a petition for her release, and delivered a letter urging the same thing to former PM David Cameron. This, it transpired much later, was after murky 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 lay low and let diplomacy take its course.
“It was state hostage-taking,” says Joseph Fiennes, who plays Richard Ratcliffe in the BBC’s four-part drama Prisoner 951. “It clearly goes on, and innocent people and families are completely disrupted and tarred for life. And now I’ve told this story, I look at anyone that might be accused of something, and I don’t quite believe it.”
Back in July 2016, it was plain that something had gone terribly wrong. A dual national, Nazanin was held in jail on spying charges, separated from her two-year-old daughter. She was accused of attempting to overthrow the Iranian regime, of working for MI6, “empowering women” (in one interrogation) and earning money illegally. It sounded fanciful. She worked for the news agency Reuters – but not even its news-gathering arm, rather its charitable foundation – and she had legitimate business in Iran, taking her daughter to see her parents.
