It’s 10 years since Australian journalist Peter Greste walked free from an Egyptian jail after a harrowing 400 days behind bars.
On 29 December 2013, while working as a foreign correspondent in Cairo for the Al Jazeera news organisation, authorities arrested the award-winning reporter and wrongly accused him of being a terrorist. Sentenced to seven years in jail, he was finally released on 1 February 2015 and flown home to Australia.
“The whole experience changed my life,” tells Peter, 59, now a university lecturer in Brisbane. “It ruined my career as a foreign correspondent. I’m a convicted terrorist and there’s a cell waiting for me in Egypt if I ever wind up back there. Regardless, the ordeal made me recognise I’m far stronger than I’d ever imagined.
“If you’d have asked me beforehand how I’d cope being imprisoned in Egypt, I’d have said I couldn’t handle four days, much less 400. But it turns out that I can! And I’ve made a career out of my experience. I’ve told the story countless times and written the book.
“In a way, I’ve weaponised it. They tried to shut me up and take away my voice. Now any time that I have an audience, it’s kind of saying, ‘Screw you!’ to the Egyptian authorities. They’ve given me a platform I would never have had.”
Now Peter’s fascinating story has come to life on the big screen in new film The Correspondent, starring Richard Roxburgh.
Peter enthuses, “Richard did a stunning job playing me – an absolutely stellar job! This movie helps people understand what it was like to live inside a concrete box for so long. Richard managed to nail that in such intense ways I’d never anticipated.”
Leading up to filming, Peter and the Elvis actor spent time together so Richard, 63, could study his personality.
The journalist tells, “It was a little spooky. I paid him a visit on set one day, watching him play me. I asked him, ‘Is it weird having me here?’ He said no because he wasn’t trying to impersonate me as such.
“He didn’t try to copy my voice, my walk or anything like that, though people who know me will recognise some elements. The filmmakers wanted Richard to embody the experience rather than mimic me.
“That let me off the hook. I didn’t have to worry about seeing if he had mannerisms right. I could just sit back and watch an actor at the height of his craft exploring what I went through.”
Peter says the film, based on his memoir The Correspondent, is a timely reminder how dangerous it has become for journalists to do their job.
“I hope no one goes into this movie expecting to see a lecture about freedom. First and foremost, it’s a damn good drama!” he says. “But issues around media freedom do lie at the core of the movie. More journalists are being murdered on the job and more journalists are in prison than ever before.”
Peter believes repeated heartfelt public pleas by his worried parents Lois and Juris throughout his imprisonment spurred the Australian government to push harder on securing his release.
“Australians fell in love with my mum and dad,” he grins. “It was my parents who were showing up at the news conferences all the time and speaking passionately. That’s what the public were responding to.”
Though he and his family no longer speak much about this traumatic time of his life, Peter says, “It did really deepen our relationship – I owe them my life.”
Richard recalls
Moulin Rouge! actor Richard Roxburgh has vivid memories of when authorities arrested Peter in Egypt back in 2013.
“I followed the story quite closely,” he recalls. “I assumed it would be over in a week. For that not to happen and for him to be imprisoned, then for it to turn out that there was no way to spring this person out of jail… I felt gobsmacked.”
When approached to portray the journalist in The Correspondent, Richard says he was “slightly concerned” about taking on such a high-profile figure.
“I’ve played a few real-life characters who are in the public consciousness,” tells Richard, who has also appeared in Mission: Impossible 2 and Van Helsing. “To play someone you can’t invent from scratch means you have to take stock of them as an actor.
“I was concerned about that, but in conversations, it became clear it wasn’t going to be about me trying to become Peter. We don’t really look alike – it’s about everything else. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it.”
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
