Helen Mirren to reunite with The Queen producer Andy Harries for retired detective role
Actress “sick of receiving terrible scripts that either had her character suffering from dementia or dying in a cancer ward”
The Crown executive producer Andy Harries may have found a new Queen in Claire Foy but he has also worked with another – Helen Mirren who played Her Maj in his other royal drama The Queen.
The Oscar-winning film was released in 2006 but, 11 years on, Harries and Mirren are set to reunite.
The producer is touting a new drama around broadcasters penned by writer Guy Hibbert which will see Mirren play a retired detective training police personnel at a refugee camp in Jordan. Hibbert penned the 2015 Mirren feature film Eye in the Sky.
“Helen was sick of receiving terrible scripts that either had her character suffering from dementia or dying in a cancer ward,” Harries tells journalist Steve Clarke in the forthcoming issue of the Royal Television Society’s magazine, Television.
“She wanted something that reflected her own life as an active, 70-year-old woman.”
Harries – who also worked with the actress on Prime Suspect for ITV in 2003 and 2006 – is currently thought to be touting the drama idea to various UK and international broadcasters.
The executive is currently overseeing series two of The Crown which is expected to be available to Netflix subscribers in November.
At least two more series are thought to have been commissioned. Series three will begin in the early 1960s while series four will take the story through to the age of Thatcher and Diana, Princess of Wales.
