Police at Luton airport recently detained four actors on their way back from the Berlin Film Festival under the counter-terrorism act. They were travelling with two of the former terrorism suspects that they play in Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantánamo. The police seemed very interested in their future careers:
"She asked me whether I intended to do more documentary films, specifically more political ones like The Road to Guantánamo. She asked 'Did you become an actor mainly to do films like this, to publicise the struggles of Muslims?'" Mr Ahmed alleged that he had a telephone wrestled from his hand as he tried to contact a lawyer and was later abused. He claimed that one police officer had called him a "fucker".
That was probably method acting. We all now know that the police love nothing more than the occasional bout of acting work and the cops in this instance were probably just trying to get their CVs waved under Michael Winterbottom's nose. This is exactly how Dale 'Bulldog' Winton formally of the armed rapid response unit got his first big break in TV. One minute he's facing down tooled up bank robbers and the next he's hosting 'Supermarket Sweep'.
This incident follows a similar one last year when sometime actor and heavy metal vocalist Christopher Lee was stopped and detained by police at Heathrow and questioned for several hours about his allegiance to Mordor and whether he would continue to make pro Sauron movies in the future...
