Jimmy Savile Survivors Break Silence On Helping Steve Coogan Play Their Abuser In BBC Drama ‘The Reckoning’: “His Voice Gave Me A Proper Shock”
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Sam Brown vividly recalls her visceral reaction to Steve Coogan. The BAFTA-winning actor was fresh from shooting a scene when he walked across a Cheshire graveyard in her direction.
With lightening white hair, makeup, and in full costume, Coogan was unmistakably the image of Jimmy Savile, the dead BBC presenter who repeatedly abused Brown when she was just a child.
Brown arrived at the encounter determined to face the specter of her tormenter, but nothing could prepare her for the “powerful” jolt that shot through her body as Coogan approached. “As he was walking towards me, in my head I was thinking, ‘No, go away.’ I kept thinking, ‘Go away.’ Seemingly this wasn’t kept in my head.
I was saying all of this [out loud] and didn’t realize I was bloody saying it. I was so embarrassed,” she remembers. Brown was one of a number of Savile survivors welcomed onto the set of The Reckoning, the four-part BBC series that dramatizes the life of the pedophile who hoodwinked a nation.
Read more on deadline.com