Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Line of Duty star: Bomb blew up our rental car at tourist spot
Adrian’s shock on family trip to Jerusalem
LINE of Duty star Adrian Dunbar and his family became terror targets when their car was blown up during a visit to Jerusalem.
The 62-year-old actor, who plays Superintendent Ted Hastings in the hit BBC crime series, has told how he and his wife, actress Anna Nygh, daughter Madeleine and stepson Ted were in the Old City when the bomb went off.
He said: “I looked up into the sky and I just knew it was our car. I said to Anna, who was with the kids, ‘Wait here. I’m just going to go and look at something’.
“She said, ‘Why? What was that?’ and I said, ‘Don’t worry about it’.”
It happened during the First Intifada, a series of Palestinian protests against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza between 1987 and 1993.
He said: “I knew just from where the direction was and the fact that we were driving a budget American car and the Intifada was still on that they had identified the car was an American car.
“When I went down, the car was a mangled heap. Thankfully, we didn’t have anything serious in it, passports or anything. But I just dealt with it like, ‘Oh, God, somebody’s blown up our car’.”
Speaking on the How To Fail podcast, Adrian admitted that having grown up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, he was less shaken by the attack than others might have been.
He admitted growing up in times of sectarian violence had left him with a “wariness” after he moved to London in 1982, making him suspicious of people in case they were planting bombs.
He said: “When I first arrived, I did notice things that other people would not be aware of. If someone threw their bag down in the corner and went to the toilet I would be waiting for him to come back out of the toilet and sit back down beside his bag, rather than just walk back out the door.
“You would be wary of silly things like seeing a car parked on its own, looking abandoned outside a public building.
“You wouldn’t be thinking about it, but fleetingly these things would register with you.”
Line of Duty is going from strength to
strength, with the opening episode of the sixth series bringing in 9.6 million viewers for BBC One, making it the bestperforming drama on UK television since Bodyguard in 2018.
Adrian also spoke in the podcast about his 86-year-old mother, Pauline, who is in a care home in Northern Ireland and has Alzheimer’s disease.
The disease has left her unable to appreciate her son’s success.
He said: “She’s with us, but she’s kind of not with us.”
It had been three years since he had been able to have a proper conversation with his mother, he revealed.
Adrian said: “I have sat down and talked to her and we have been in each other’s company, but she cannot speak to us any more.
“The Alzheimer’s thing is a killer as it is not allowing me to share this particular success with my mother.
“That’s one of the things as well as robbing the person of all their memories.
“It really is the most cruel disease – it has stopped me sharing this present success with her.”
You would be wary of silly things like a car parked on its own ADRIAN DUNBAR ON GROWING UP IN TROUBLES