Hatton
Garden, the four-part series that starts on ITV
Choice (DStv 123) on Wednesday, July 24 at 20H00, is based on the true story of
four elderly men who pulled off an audacious night-time raid of an underground
vault in London, stealing millions of pounds worth of jewellery and cash over
the Easter weekend in 2015.
Timothy Spall stars as the gang's
ringleader Terry Perkins, a 67-year-old diabetic career criminal doing one last
job before his retirement. One of Britain's best-known actors, Spall is most
famous for his starring role in Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Speaking about the show, Spall said: “They
are not lovable rogues. They are criminals. And as we all know, criminality
requires ruthlessness. That’s a given part of the chosen profession.”
Spall has also revealed that the role was
“bloody gruelling”.
“The filmmakers recreated the vault in the
studio and in filming our story you realised these were old blokes working very
hard in what was very difficult, physical, skilled engineering. So when we got
down to filming the work, you realise how hard it was. No wonder my character
and the others were exhausted. They were old, Spall says.
“You really got a sense of how difficult it
was to drill through concrete with one of those diamond drills. It was a bit
like being involved with some bizarre engineering feat. It was bloody
gruelling. We were running up and down stairways at 3am. Some of it was a bit
challenging. But we always had somebody standing by with a cup of tea and a
chair. Unlike most people who do that sort of thing.”
Spall stars alongside Kenneth Cranham (Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool), who
plays Brian Reader; David Hayman (The Boy
in the Striped Pyjamas), who plays criminal mastermind Daniel Jones; Alex
Norton (Shetland) as cockney crook
John Kenneth Collins; Brian F O’Byrne (Little
Boy Blue) as alarm specialist Michael Seed and Geoff Bell (Kingsman: The Secret Service) who plays
Carl Wood.
Originally due to air in the UK in December
2017, the series was put on hold after prosecutors advised that it would clash
with the trial, and re-scheduled for a second time following the trial of final
suspect Michael Seed who was convicted in March this year.
Hatton
Garden was written by Bafta-winning screenwriter
Jeff Pope, who was responsible for the series about the murder of Rhys Jones, Little Boy Blue (shown on ITV Choice in
2018).
Pope and the cast visited the real Hatton
Garden vault during the series, with the screenwriter adding it “takes your
breath away” that the group managed to pull it off.
“We visited the real vault and looked
through the holes that were drilled, which were phenomenally small. We use
exactly the same dimensions in the drama. The hole our two actors went through,
in terms of the two gang members who went into the vault, is the exact size of
the hole in the real vault and my goodness it was a struggle for them to get
through it,” Pope says.
Spall's character Terry Perkins died in
Belmarsh Prison last year.
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