‘It felt way out of my depth’: Colin Firth on Lockerbie, the new TV drama about UK’s deadliest terror attack

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died on Pan Am flight 103, has dedicated his life to finding the truth behind what happened to his child. It’s a quest that has inspired a five-part series, starring Colin Firth. Ellie Harrison hears from the actor, his co-star and the show’s creators about telling Jim’s story

On the evening of 21 December 1988, Jim and Jane Swire were preparing for Christmas in the warm glow of their home in the sleepy Worcestershire village of Finstall. They had just waved goodbye to their 23-year-old daughter Flora, who was jetting off to New York to visit her boyfriend for the holidays. Shortly after 7pm, a newsflash appeared on the Swires’ television, announcing that a plane had gone down over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. From that point on, their lives were never the same again.

Flora was one of 270 people killed in what remains, to this day, the deadliest terror attack ever to have taken place in Britain. Thirty-eight minutes after Pan Am flight 103 took off from Heathrow on its journey to New York, a bomb on board exploded, killing every passenger and crew member as well as 11 people on the ground below.

Now, just over 36 years on, a new Sky Atlantic drama, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, tells the story of Jim’s search for answers to what happened that night – a quest that for the former GP, now 88 years old, continues to this day. Colin Firth, who plays Jim, his face permanently crumpled in anguish, has said he was “just overwhelmed by the relentless sadness of Jim’s journey”. The show, which has been years in the making and spans several decades, co-stars Catherine McCormack as Jim’s wife Jane, who has remained by her husband’s side even when his obsession with the case threatened to tear what was left of their family apart.

The case of the Lockerbie bombing continues to throw up more questions than answers. Only one man has ever been convicted of the attack – the Libyan national Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, in 2001. But several concerns have emerged in the years since the trial. We now know that the US government paid two central witnesses millions to give evidence in court. And a fragment of electronic circuit board, a key piece of forensic evidence in the case, has also been discredited by electronic experts – with theories that it was actually planted by the CIA even being raised in the Commons, and an anonymous Scottish police chief claiming the evidence was fabricated.

Megrahi – who served eight and a half years of his life sentence in prison before he was released back to Libya on compassionate grounds in 2009 – maintained his innocence until his death in 2012 from prostate cancer. While in prison, he developed an unconventional (and controversial) friendship with Jim, who had taken to visiting him, and as a result Jim slowly became convinced that Megrahi had been framed. Jim had initially been instrumental in securing Megrahi’s extradition to the UK – even flying to Libya to persuade Colonel Gaddafi to send Megrahi to trial – but as his doubts grew, he ended up campaigning for the Libyan’s retrial and release.

Jim’s hypothesis (regarded by some as a conspiracy theory) is that it was Iran that was really behind the attack, planting the bomb at Heathrow in revenge after a US missile cruiser in the Gulf shot down an Iranian commercial plane full of innocent civilians earlier that year during the Iran-Iraq war. He believes Megrahi was used as a political pawn, by the US and the UK; it has been speculated that, back then, it suited both countries to lay the blame on Libya in order to take the heat off Iran, which each government needed on side during the conflict with Iraq. 

To this day, American and British governments maintain that the bomb originated in Malta and was flown to Heathrow as part of a Libyan plot, potentially in retaliation for the US bombing of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, in 1986. Another Libyan national, Abu Agila Masud, who is alleged to have helped make the bomb, is to go on trial in the US in May 2025 facing three charges, which he denies.

Firth, speaking at a screening for the series, said the script instantly had an “emotional impact” on him. “It was less the legal investigation or thriller element of it, and far more how it made me feel, seeing this representation of Jim and Jane and their family, and their journey of having carried this for so long, and still carrying it.”

Firth was stunned by how many “twist and turns” there were in the story the drama presents; how many times Jim would be going down one line of inquiry only to be diverted and have his theory “flipped on its head, having committed himself so completely to the pursuit of a solution”. He was in awe of Jim’s “courage and integrity in allowing that diversion to take place, and not to cling to his original theory... He let evidence and facts speak to him, even if that meant profoundly changing course. That really struck me.”

Firth as Jim Swire, who became obsessed with the case (Graeme Hunter Pictures)

The actor met with the Swires at their home, where he realised the extent of Jim’s “alertness and intellectual agility” and “what a huge thing to live up to this was going to be”. “You always feel a bit out of your depth when you start a job, but this really felt way out of my depth,” he says.

Jim’s relentlessness was inspiring to Firth, but it’s also the characteristic that nearly broke his grieving family. In the drama, he becomes increasingly fixated and isolated, holed up in his office, perpetually unravelling a spider’s web of information, and is practically absent for the big milestones in his other children’s lives. At one point, McCormack’s Jane announces she wants to move out of the Finstall home where they found out Flora had died. “I want to be around life, not death,” she says. “Not death, every single minute of the day.”

And it’s not only Jim’s family who want to move on. In one scene, journalist Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton), who’s been helping Jim dig deeper into the case, tells him: “Most people think [Megrahi] did it, and want to forget.”

Screenwriter David Harrower made sure to portray the anger many of the bereaved families felt towards Jim, and the fact that many of them saw him as a crank conspiracy theorist. “It’s important to say that there are other beliefs,” he says. “We’re not just following one man or one family who believe a certain thing. We’ve got other people in it, and it was important to show that there are other sides to this. We’re not just propagating one way of thinking.”

The drama, which is based on Jim’s book, Lockerbie: A Father’s Search for Justice, has already been condemned by the US-based campaign group Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, who raised concerns that it will promote a “false narrative”.

Jim Swire pictured in 2007: his quest continues to this day (Getty)

This division between the Swires and the other bereaved families has meant that their grief has been lonelier than it might have been had Jim just accepted Megrahi’s conviction. We see Jane experience terrifying flashbacks and nightmares. And there’s an extraordinarily potent scene where she painstakingly counts out the 15 seconds for which Flora might have been aware that she was falling through the sky to her death.

“Jane would read up about the disintegration of aircraft,” says McCormack, “and the last moments, potentially, of someone’s life if they were conscious. And so I kept that with me.”

Firth says the counting moment “changes the scene on a sixpence because, up to that point, my character is getting quite overwrought and frustrated... and it just cuts through that.” McCormack watched lots of footage of Jane in news clips and documentaries from over the years, in an attempt to capture her “dignity, grace, strength and, of course, vulnerability”.

Lockerbie, says Harrower, left “a real scar on the Scottish psyche”. Newborn babies fell from the plane. One 14-year-old Lockerbie boy lost both his parents and his little sister when the wreckage landed on their home. But still, there is a danger of it being forgotten. At one point in the drama, when it enters the 2010s, we watch Jim jolt with the realisation that a young Scottish woman he comes across, working at a café, has no idea what the Lockerbie disaster was.

But the creators of this series hope that telling this story through the medium of drama will put Lockerbie, and the search for the truth, back on the agenda. It’s airing exactly a year and a day after 2024’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, after all, which has become one of the most influential British TV series of all time. “I feel that there has been endless discussion about this topic, but somehow with drama, you can find a fresh perspective on something,” says executive producer Gareth Neame. “We would like to feel that we have shone a light on this murky, murky subject, in a way that has never been adequately done before.”

‘Lockerbie: A Search for Truth’ airs at 9pm on Sky Atlantic on 2 January