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For David Tennant and Robert Carlyle, The Hack is more than just a TV drama – it’s personal.
Set between 2002 and 2012, the knotty new seven-parter about the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed the Murdoch media in Britain at the time interweaves two real-life stories. Tennant plays The Guardian’s investigative journalist, Nick Davies, who uncovered evidence that phone hacking – dialling in to people’s voicemails and intercepting their messages – was rife at the News of the World, a British tabloid.
Running parallel, writer Jack Thorne, who won an Emmy last week for Adolescence, tells the story of the investigation into the unsolved murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan, led by Met Police Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook, played by Carlyle.
At the time of the scandal, both actors were smack bang in the public eye, Carlyle still flying high on the back of his breakout role in Trainspotting and Tennant playing the Tenth Doctor in Doctor Who. Both believe they had their phones hacked by journalists in the UK.
Tennant and Robert Carlyle as detective Dave Cook in The Hack.
“It’s an extraordinary piece of recent history that I lived through and had a glancing blow with,” says Tennant. He’s referring, very cautiously, to his part as one of 1600 people who settled out of court with the publishers of the now defunct News of the World over the phone-hacking scandal.
“Yes, it’s a personal story to a certain extent,” says Carlyle. “I can’t say for sure that it happened to me, but it’s likely that it did. Things were coming out in the press which seemed to be personal stuff. And actually, myself and my wife, we fell out with two people because we thought they were giving it all that [talking to the press]. It was only later, once the hacking story came out, that we went, ‘Oh Jesus Christ – I think that’s what it was.’”
Yet the “hacking story” Carlyle refers to is only one part of The Hack. By pulling at the threads that link phone hacking at the News of the World with police corruption and Daniel Morgan’s murder, it is trying to ask bigger questions about power dynamics and truth-telling in general.
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“The ability to tell a story that you think you know, but you don’t was one part of the drive to do this,” says executive producer Patrick Spence. “The other part is it’s a story about an abuse of power, and there’s nothing more important, I think, than showing that.”
It was only once Spence and this team began researching the hacking scandal that they realised the investigation into Morgan was a separate story they could stand alongside phone hacking … and, Watergate break-in style, together they become something far bigger.
“We ask the audience to look for the links,” says Spence. “And we find that we literally didn’t know half the story.”
What starts out as a tale of grubby journalism and celebrity tittle-tattle soon spirals into an investigation about who was pulling the strings in the C-suites and the corridors of power.
And that means that although The Hack is set nearly 20 years ago and in another country, its message couldn’t be more current.
“It’s a story that needs retelling,” says Tennant. “Because it also speaks to where we are now. It’s about the truth tellers – people like yourself, journalists and how they hold the powerful to account.”
Tennant and Toby Jones as Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in The Hack.
Both actors agree that despite the treatment they’ve had at the hands of the press over the years, unearthing facts and reporting them without fear or favour has never been harder.
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“Truth and the preservation of truth,” says Carlyle, “That’s under attack like never before. I do genuinely feel for good, honest journalists these days. You’re investigating something for months, sometimes years, you put the story out and someone goes, ‘Fake!’ Just that one word can crack the foundation for a journalist and if we can’t trust in honest journalism, then we’re in trouble.”
Neither of them need to point to the president of the United States espousing free speech while threatening media organisations, or Jeff Bezos swaying the editorial line of The Washington Post, to make their point. The Hack does it for them.
“This is a story of how important it is to maintain the standards of speaking truth to power,” Tennant says. “It’s an important, compelling, necessary story to tell.”
Tennant spoke at length with Davies, the investigative reporter who he plays, and his take on journalism in general is that he can see how commercial pressures on an industry beset from all sides might lead to shortcuts.
Jordan Renzo as James Murdoch and Steve Pemberton as Rupert Murdoch, who owned the News of the World.
“What’s really interesting is you can kind of understand how it [phone hacking] happened,” Tennant says. “News gathering is tough and getting tougher. You can see how a shortcut would be so appealing. You can see how that grows into a bubble of accepted behaviour … and how the cost of it is just forgotten. But that’s where our story really connects – it’s when you hear the stories of how lives were ruined, of how people didn’t know who they could trust any more and of how families were split up.”
One of those families was Dave Cook’s, the detective played by Carlyle.
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“I spoke to Dave several times,” Carlyle says. “He’s a lovely man, but he was damaged by this. It affected his career, it affected his marriage, it affected his health. As the series progresses you’ll see that he contracts vertigo – and he still suffers from it today. I saw him walking here today. He was all over the place.”
There is a simmering anger that fuels The Hack and in this it will remind viewers of last year’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office. That was a British drama about an IT scandal that ended up with innocent postmasters being accused of theft, going to prison and some taking their lives. Mr Bates was that rarest of things – a TV drama with a point to make that ended up dominating the national conversation in the UK. It made a difference.
It’s no coincidence that The Hack is made by the same team that made Mr Bates, and it has similar aims in mind. Both shows tell human stories about wrongdoing perpetrated by the powerful with the surefire expectation that they’ll get away with it. They also show what it takes for an individual to fight back.
“Whether it’s All the President’s Men or Mr Bates or any of those stories, it is about the courage it takes to say, ‘I’m not letting you get away with this’,” Spence says. “I think it is probably as true in Australia as it is in the UK – we just can’t stand bullies. And these people were being bullied and they decided to fight back.”
Carlyle plays the detective who investigated the unsolved murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan.
The fight continues: ironically, one of the aims of a drama about the importance of speaking truth to power is to hold the UK government to account. To date, the second part of the Leveson Inquiry (2012), which was meant to investigate the relationship between journalists and the police, has never been held, with successive British governments of both hues quietly shelving it. Tom Watson, British Labour’s former deputy leader who was himself hacked, said not going ahead with the second part of the inquiry was a “bitter blow to the victims of press intrusion”.
“It’s clear that several questions remain unanswered,” Spence says. “This drama is our contribution to that conversation.”
The Hack streams on Stan* from September 24.
Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.
