Dornan to star in Maze jailbreak movie
ULSTER-BORN Hollywood actor Jamie Dornan is to star in a film adaptation about the notorious 1983 Maze prison breakout.
Thirty-eight republican inmates fled the maximum security facility in September 1983 in the biggest prison break in British or Irish history.
Nineteen were recaptured within a short period, but the rest got away.
The escapees included Old Bailey bomber Gerry Kelly, now a Sinn Fein MLA, who went on to write a book about the escape.
Warder James Ferris died of a heart attack after being stabbed during the escape. Two others were shot but survived.
The mass escape was described at the time by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as “the greatest incident in British prison history”.
The film is set to be directed by three-time Oscar nominated writer/director Jim Sheridan and is called ‘H-Block’.
It will be produced by Dylan Sellars.
Cillian Murphy stars as the head of the ring of IRA prisoners who has earned the respect of the prison guards and wants a life of peace.
Dornan plays a violent prisoner who starts discovering weaknesses in the prison and is one of the last to agree to escape and when he does he leaves with a vengeance on the way out.
It’s understood Pierce Brosnan is in talks to play the warden of the prison who is pitted against the escapees.
The film will see Dornan and Murphy teaming up again after they starred together in Anthropoid.
It centred on the plot to kill SS beast Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust.
H-Block is the second film to be in production about the Maze breakout.
‘Maze’ is currently in post-production and its makers were accused of “romanticising the violence” of the breakout.
Written and produced by Stephen Burke, it was shot in the decommissioned Cork Prison and around Cork city, and stars Martin McC ann, Barry Ward and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.
It is due for release on September 22.