AN ACTOR’S OBSERVATION –
April 17, 2025 – At 8.30am, on the morning of 7 July 2005, Max Beesley was at a hotel in Marylebone participating in a read-through for a new BBC drama, Hotel Babylon. The producer had asked everyone to be in early and the actor – star at the time of Jed Mercurio’s medical drama Bodies – had been there in good time. By 9am, as the cast were going over their lines, they heard multiple sirens screaming on the road outside. Ten minutes earlier, suicide bombers had detonated improvised explosive devices on three underground trains. One was at Edgware Road Station, less than half a mile away. Another exploded on a Piccadilly Line train leaving King’s Cross, two miles down the road. One hour later, a fourth bomb was detonated close by, on a double-decker bus. The blasts killed 52 people (not including the four Islamist suicide bombers), and the proximity of the bombers in enclosed spaces led to a horrifying 775 people being injured. The actor on society’s problematic relationship with drinking, growing up with Robbie Williams and his new drama about the London bombings…
