The Salisbury Poisonings team had to avoid filming in city as traumatised locals still ‘very emotive’ about tragedy
THE Salisbury Poisonings star Anne-Marie Duff admitted much of the new BBC One drama was not filmed locally out of respect for the locals.
The actress, 49, plays Tracy Daszkiewicz the director of public health at Wiltshire council, who took charge after the deadly nerve agent novichok was spread through Salisbury via a perfume bottle in 2018.
Anne-Marie appeared on This Morning on Friday to talk about the hotly anticipated drama and revealed they did not want to film in Salisbury because the attack was still too raw for locals.
“There are a few wee bits that were shot in Salisbury, because we couldn’t mock up certain areas but generally speaking we avoided it,” she explained.
“It would have been a very emotive experience for people walking down the street to have seen mock ups of what happened.
She also defended the decision to make a drama about the attack so soon after it happened.
“Do we tell a story years down the line, when there may be inaccuracies, because people want a bit more dramatic effect? ‘Or do we tell a story when we’re still having a conversation about something?” Anne-Marie asked.
“It pulls… people’s nerve endings still feel it, and their voices are still begging to be heard.”
Russian spies were believed to have been to be deployed Salisbury to assassinate former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia using the deadly nerve agent.
They were found slumped on a bench in a “catatonic state” and it was revealed that the pair had been victims of a nerve agent attack, but survived the attack.
After further investigation, it was discovered that the nerve agent had been administered to their home’s door handle.
Dawn Sturgess died after she and her boyfriend Charlie Rowley were exposed to the same Novichok nerve agent, when he found some discarded perfume bottles in the town of Amesbury, that he gave to Dawn as a gift.
The two Russians accused of carrying out the attack, were seen visiting Salisbury at the time gave the now infamous interview claiming they had been in the area to visit the famous “123-metre spire”.
The star-studded BBC1 drama The Salisbury Poisonings reveals just how close the nerve agent came to killing thousands more — and the untold stories of the everyday heroes in the local emergency response who helped contain it.
Anne-Marie boasted about critical Tracy’s role was throughout the incident.
She told The Times: “I think this is a story about those people: the people who pick up after us, the people who take our rubbish away and who stack shelves and get paid sometimes less than the minimum wage, unfortunately.
“They are our superheroes, and this drama is about a few of those superheroes.”
Tracy was responsible for tracking down the invisible chemical and also make the brave decision to order a lockdown of the city.
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She also called for an elaborate tracing and testing program, distributed PPE for essential staff, all while trying to keep the public calm.
“This was something so extraordinary, and to be surrounded by a group of strangers — predominantly male strangers — it was very frightening for her. Yet Tracy is somebody who takes responsibility, and that’s the story I was trying to tell,” Anne-Marrie explained.
The actress explained Tracy needed to have a “titanium” self-belief in order to deal with this unlikely, but dangerous event.
The Salisbury Poisonings will be shown across three consecutive nights on June 14, 15 and 16.
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