Truth amid tragedy

Truth amid tragedy


By Michael Pickard
January 15, 2025

STAR POWER

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth dramatises Jim Swire’s fight for justice following the 1988 Lockerbie disaster. Actor Sam Troughton tells DQ about making the impactful series, how it marries real events with human emotion, and his role as one of the few fictional characters on screen.

While Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is a factual drama recounting the Pan Am plane disaster, actor Sam Troughton was given the task of playing one of the few fictional characters in the five-part series.

A Sky and Peacock original commission, it follows Dr Jim Swire’s tireless three-decade pursuit of justice following his daughter’s death in the bombing. She was among 259 passengers and crew who lost their lives when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded on December 21, 1988, while a further 11 residents died as the wreckage of the aircraft came down on the titular Scottish town.

The story takes Jim to the deserts of Libya, where he meets Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (Nabil Alraee), and to the Netherlands for the trial of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (Ardalan Esmaili), the the Libyan national convicted for the bombing, exploring the devastating impact of the tragedy on him, his wife Jane (Catherine McCormack), their family and the families of victims around the world.

Jim (played by Colin Firth) becomes the nominated spokesperson for the UK victims’ families, yet his relentless search for the truth not only jeopardises his stability, family and life but also overturns his belief in the justice system.

Through the series – written by David Harrower and directed by Otto Bathurst – Jim strikes up a friendship with Troughton’s character, Murray Guthrie, a journalist who is among the first on the scene after the explosion just 38 minutes into the transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit, via stops in London and New York City.

Sam Troughton plays journalist Murray in Lockerbie: A Search for Truth

Unlike most other characters in the drama, Murray isn’t a real-life figure who was involved in the events. Instead, he is an amalgamation of various journalists and people who supported Jim on his mission.

“Right from the start, auditioning with Otto, he talked about telling this type of story and the need to bring different energies into the narrative,” Troughton tells DQ. “Murray was very much created with that in mind. He also brings a different POV in that he doesn’t have any personal [connections] – he’s not from Lockerbie, he doesn’t have anyone on the flight.

“He can also provide a lot of information and narrative. But the skill of the script is that it weaves into it a very unlikely friendship between him and Jim and, as the years go by, that comes under more and more pressure. There’s a compromising nature to becoming a much more successful journalist than he was planning on being, and obviously there then come different responsibilities with that. There are clashes later in the series when Murray can’t print stories in the paper he’s writing for and Jim obviously can’t see why he wouldn’t do that. Independent of the subject, it was a really interesting thing to play an unlikely friendship of 30 years.”

Troughton also says there’s very much an “odd couple” element to the pair, who he believes would never have met had terrible circumstances not brought them together.

“There’s something about how Murray is with Jim at the memorial, where he’s very straightforward with Jim, and I think Jim appreciates that,” the actor notes. “I remember Colin talking about it in rehearsals, that something so terrible has happened, and people going ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry’ is almost too frustrating. But someone [like Murray] coming straight in is what connects them, and they’re off and running.”

The fact-based drama focuses on Dr Jim Swire (Colin Firth)’s quest for justice for the Lockerbie bombing

While his recent credits include Black Doves, The Lazarus Project, Ragdoll and The Outlaws, Troughton is no stranger to fact-based dramas, having also appeared in shows such as A Very Royal Scandal, Stephen, The Trial of Christine Keeler, Chernobyl and feature biopic Mank.

But from the start, Lockerbie – produced by Carnival Films and Sky Studios, and distributed by NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution – felt like “a pretty incredible thing” for the actor to be part of. It debuted on Sky in the UK and Ireland and Peacock in the US earlier this month, with further Sky launches in Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland to come later this year.

“I’ve done a few other things based on real-life tragedies, and you do feel a responsibility,” he says. “As an actor, you’ll absolutely fight the corner of whoever you’re playing anyway, but you do feel a responsibility to tell it with respect. When I first read the scripts, it was clear they were very well researched and the story was important. If you were to read something and think, ‘This might be exploitative,’ then you probably wouldn’t do it. But it was obvious from the first two episodes I read for the audition. I was like, ‘It’s good stuff.’”

While the story of the Lockerbie disaster could be told from numerous angles – an upcoming BBC and Netflix drama focuses on the British and US investigations – Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is a personal story from the perspective of Jim and Jane that is a study of their grief as much as it delves into the wider geopolitical ramifications of the tragedy.

“How on earth do you deal with something so senseless happening to someone you love? It exists on that level as well,” Troughton says. “When you make something like this into a drama, there has to be that fuller, rounder thing that also separates it from being a documentary. It’s doing the same thing about awareness but there’s also the human story.”

Rather than being based on one real person, Murray is an amalgamation of several people involved

Playing a fictional character in the series afforded Troughton more freedom to create “Murray” beyond what Harrower had built in the scripts, having never been told he was based on any particular person.

“And there’s a great freedom to create something from scratch, which, of course, is informed by not just what’s in the script, but stuff you’ll read that sparks your imagination,” he explains. “I read a lot of the first-responder testimonies about the night of the crash. I read a piece about a local journalist who had gone there. And the thing that united everyone is just obviously no one expected it. They’d heard there’d been a plane crash, but they were thinking of a fighter jet in a field. No one’s prepared for what comes next. So there’s a kind of creative freedom, and Otto gave me permission to lean into that. Then, of course, you can always pull back if you go a bit too far. I’m not saying he’s a comic character, but when telling stories about stuff like this, you do need the light and shade.”

Murray is among the first on the scene at Sherwood Crescent, where the wings of the aircraft and other wreckage landed. For the show, the street was recreated at a disused army base between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

“You were there with the lights and sirens, and buildings on fire. When you’re on set, it’s very easy to be able to imagine yourself there,” Troughton says. “There was no green screen stuff; it was all real. There was the surrealness of it. Cutlery on the floor is one of the first things Murray notices, and he can’t quite put it together.”

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth debuted on Sky and Peacock earlier this month

As the series progresses, Murray continues to research and dig around to find out what really happened, sending Jim off to Libya before joining him in the Netherlands. His work later sees him land a job at a Glasgow newspaper. “Covering the story provides him with a successful journalistic career, but then there’s a tension between that and his friendship with Jim and Jim’s priorities,” Troughton says.

Based on Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph’s book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, the series serves to put the tragedy back in the public’s consciousness 36 years after it happened. Troughton believes the event and its impact still resonate today, while it is also “an incredible story on a human level of Jim and his family and how you deal with a grief that is so difficult to make sense of.”

“That’s why they’re after justice. That lack of answers is just horrendous,” he adds. “It’s very difficult to find a consensus on who did it and what happened. But there was very much a sense right from the beginning that it was somehow being brushed under the carpet and forgotten about. Jim and the other families wanted to make sure that wasn’t going to happen.”

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