Hollywood turned the biggest mistake of my career into a movie

Hell is other people, so goes the old adage – and perhaps never is that more true than when someone else is playing you on screen.

It’s a reality that actor Steve Coogan and the producers of the 2022 film The Lost King now know only too well, after agreeing to pay “substantial damages” to Loughborough University academic Richard Taylor in an out-of-court libel settlement on Monday.

Taylor brought the claim against Coogan, his production company Baby Cow Productions and Pathé Productions after seeing a version of himself that he didn’t recognise in the film, which depicts the 2012 discovery of Richard III’s remains.

A judge later deemed the portrayal of Taylor to be “smug, unduly dismissive and patronising” – a depiction that caused “serious harm to his professional and personal reputations and caused enormous distress and embarrassment”, William Bennett, a lawyer acting for Taylor, said.

I can relate.

In the spring of 2018, a message popped into my inbox from a friend who told me that the sister of one of his friends – a young actress named Hanako Footman – had been asked to play me in a Hollywood movie.

At first, I couldn’t imagine why. Then a quick Google search made it abundantly clear. The film, Official Secrets, starring Keira Knightley, was to retell the story of British whistleblower Katharine Gun, a 28-year-old translator at GCHQ in Cheltenham.

In 2003, Gun leaked a top-secret memo to The Observer about an illegal spying operation ordered by the US National Security Agency to bug the phones and emails of six United Nations delegates from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan – countries whose votes could determine whether the UN approved the invasion of Iraq.

While I was only a bit-player in the story, Official Secrets was also set to put the biggest mistake of my career on the big screen. The prospect, quite literally, gave me nightmares.

At the time, I was a 24-year-old who had just started working on The Observer’s foreign desk – my first job in journalism.

It was stressful and fun, and I instantly loved it. Towards the end of my second week, I was handed a paper printout and asked to type it up and save it. No further information was given, aside from the instruction: “Don’t make any mistakes.” So I set about painstakingly typing in each sentence.

That Sunday, I woke to see the paper’s front-page story headlined “Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war” – and beneath it, a replica of the document I’d typed.

I was proud to have played a small part in The Observer’s team that broke the story. Until a phone call from one of the editors informed me – with deft understatement and a total lack of drama – that I had caused “something of an international incident”.

In my effort to be thorough, and not knowing what the document was or where it came from, I had “corrected” all the American spelling “mistakes” to British English. “Recognize” became “recognise”, “emphasize” became “emphasise”, and “favorable” was amended to “favourable”. I thought I was preventing errors. In fact, I’d created a disaster.

Gun’s whistleblowing, which should have sent shockwaves around the world, was now being dismissed as a fake. Thousands of readers – many American – complained that the story’s authors had fallen for a hoax or a campaign of misinformation.

My actions had been an innocent mistake born of diligence, but I agonised over how, as the new girl, I would ever regain the paper’s trust.

Yet my blunder paled into insignificance compared with what it meant for Gun. Everything she and my colleagues had worked for was suddenly discredited. The film would go on to chronicle all of this – as well as her decision to reveal her identity, her arrest, and her eventual trial under the Official Secrets Act (a case that ultimately collapsed when the prosecution declined to present its evidence).

Sixteen years later, it was not a time in my life I wanted revisited on the big screen.

When I met Footman, the actress playing me, she was smart, diligent and clearly cared. But I wanted reassurance that the film made it clear I hadn’t been fired – that my colleagues and editors had ultimately stood by me, and that I’d gone on to work at the paper for several years.

“Not explicitly,” Footman said, “but you do appear in a later scene.”

I was dismayed that my long-forgotten mistake was being dredged up as a plot point, and worried about being cast as a movie villain when, in reality, I’d simply been doing my best. I wanted people to know that, despite this chapter of my career, I’d gone on to build a successful one.

So I called an ex-colleague who had helped break Gun’s story and was now working on the film’s script. Could my “character” be removed, I asked? He was kind and sympathetic but said there was no chance. While my role was small, he explained, my actions provided a pivotal plot point – and besides, because what happened was a matter of historical record, they didn’t need my permission to include me. They wouldn’t even change my name in the credits, meaning it would appear if someone searched online.

I was indignant, but he was – legally – right. It is entirely permissible to “create content” from someone else’s life without their consent. No individual owns the legal rights to the story of their life, and as long as the information is obtained lawfully, others are free to make use of it without permission.

The rise in popularity of these partly fictionalised dramas on streaming services and television has only amplified the trend.

Take the depiction of the Royal family in The Crown, or Pamela Anderson in 2022’s Pam & Tommy – a Disney+ series about the theft of Anderson and drummer Tommy Lee’s honeymoon sex tape, based on a 2014 Rolling Stone feature that had nothing to do with Anderson herself.

Vanity Fair picture editor Rachel DeLoache Williams even sued Netflix for defamation over what she described as a negative portrayal of her in the 2022 drama Inventing Anna, about con woman Anna Delvey.

In the weeks leading up to the release of Official Secrets, I was plagued by anxiety. With no control over how I was depicted, I felt powerless. Real life is rarely as dramatic as cinema demands, and I knew there would be poetic licence involved. When I went to an early screening for ex-colleagues, I discovered that there was plenty.

The reveal of my mistake drew audible gasps from the audience. Then my character was blamed and publicly berated in the middle of the newsroom – an imagined moment of public shaming that never happened. It was painful to watch. Worse still, there was no onward storyline for me, leaving the impression that I’d slunk away in disgrace. While the telling of Gun’s story was important, I was left in tears at my own depiction.

And while I wouldn’t recommend carrying the burden of causing “an international incident” through one’s career, it did teach me a valuable lesson in attention to detail. It was my first serious mistake – and, I hope, my last. Certainly the last to make it on to international cinema screens, at least.

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