BBC's Danny Boy actor talks about filming in Watford

The new feature-length BBC Two battlefield drama Danny Boy was shot in Watford, instead of Iraq, due to the travel restrictions enforced from the pandemic.

Written by Bafta-winner Robert Jones (Murder, Party Animals) and directed by Sam Miller (I May Destroy You, Luther), Danny Boy needed a location a little closer than home to depict a warzone.

“Sam’s done an incredible job of making it look like Iraq when it was some freezing pitch in Watford,” said leading actor Anthony Boyle, nodding to the director’s visual achievements.

Danny Boy is a gritty 90-minute film based on real life events and features Boyle taking on the role of Iraq War veteran Brian Wood, a soldier wrongly accused of historic war crimes.

Anthony Boyle pictured (Photo: Isabel Infantes/PA Archive/PA Images)

Boyle also met up with the real-life soldier which his character is based on.

The Harry Potter and the Cursed Child star said: “We were going to have a two-hour meeting and then we ended up being there for seven hours.

“It’s so rare for someone to go into intense battle zones and come out and have to be a father; to go back into civilian life.

“To look into the eyes of someone who’s actually been there was just invaluable.”

Talking about being on set in Watford, Boyle said: “We had Brian on set for the battle scenes. I didn’t really want him there when I was doing emotional, domestic things because I thought it might get in the way, but I thought it would be invaluable for the battle scenes.

“And it really was – just to have him watching me rehearse, then come over and say, ‘it was actually like this’, or ‘your blood would be up here’, ‘you’d be more focused at this point.”

Titled after the military checkpoint in Iraq, Danny Boy explores all manner of legal and moral conflicts pertaining to life within and beyond a warzone, as Boyle’s character finds himself at the mercy of the British legal system.

The real-life Sgt Wood was a lance corporal in the 1st Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment at the Battle of Danny Boy in May 2004.

The battle sparked a 13-year legal fight after British troops were given an order to remove the bodies of 20 Iraqis who had died and take them back to a nearby camp along with nine prisoners of war.

Phil Shiner from Danny Boy (Photo: BBC/Expectation TV/Robert Viglasky.)

The detainees, who were insurgents with the Shia militia Mahdi Army, went on to claim they had been mistreated and heard the torture and murder of their compatriots.

A soldier once bestowed a Military Cross for bravery by the Queen, Wood later found himself falsely accused of war crimes and was summoned to testify to the Al-Sweady Inquiry – one of Britain’s biggest ever public inquiries, into allegations of mistreatment of the Iraqi nationals by British soldiers.

Danny Boy will air on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer on May 12.