Carlyle said he cannot know for certain if he was hacked because at the time no-one was aware that “private investigators” were accessing phones and selling the contents
Trainspotting actor Robert Carlyle has said he believes he was hacked in the 1990s but only pieced it together years later after the phone-hacking scandal broke. Carlyle, 64, stars in new seven-part ITV series The Hack, which sees investigative journalist Nick Davies, played by David Tennant, uncover evidence of phone hacking at the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Of The World.
Carlyle said he cannot know for certain if he was hacked because at the time no-one was aware that “private investigators” were accessing phones and selling the contents, BBC News reported. He told the Saturday Show on BBC Radio Scotland: “At that point, I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I’m being hacked’.
“I didn’t know what hacked was, no idea, but it was many years later when all this came out, I thought, ‘You know something, that’s what was happening to me at the time’. You know, this was the 90s, anyone who was like current in the 90s was going to get it.
“And of course, with the things that I did back then, these big projects – the Trainspottings and the Full Montys – of course I was newsworthy and there were a few things that happened in my life around about that time. It was horrible, nobody would want to go through that. The problem was, at the time, when it first started to come out, is that it seemed to be pretty much centred on celebrities or sports figures or personalities of one kind or another.
“The public’s kind of perception of that was, ‘Well, we’re not really that bothered’. It changed entirely with the discovery that the News Of The World had hacked into the phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
“That name might not mean much to people at the moment, they might not remember. But that was a terrible, terrible thing… this poor kid was killed and the News Of The World hacked into her phone.
“Once it was realised that this was kind of endemic, that this wasn’t just the personalities, celebrities, this was normal public, that’s when people started to go crazy about it.” Set between 2002 and 2012, The Hack interweaves two real-life stories – the work of Davies and the investigation into the unsolved murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan.
The investigation was led by former Metropolitan Police detective chief superintendent Dave Cook, played by Carlyle. Mr Morgan, a 37-year-old father-of-two, was killed with an axe in the car park of the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, South East London, on March 10 1987.
Southern Investigations, a private detective agency, placed Mr Cook under surveillance in 2002, at the request of the News Of The World, at a time when he was leading the murder investigation. The phone-hacking scandal led to the News Of The World’s closure in 2011 and was followed by the Leveson Inquiry, a judicial public inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press.
News Group Newspapers (NGN) has since settled a number of damages claims from high-profile figures concerning unlawful information gathering. Earlier this year, the Duke of Sussex settled his legal action against the publisher of The Sun and received an apology from NGN.
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