Bafta-winning actors Toby Jones and Emily Watson have finished work on a film about the scientist behind Britain’s first spacecraft to land on Mars, which got “lost”.
Mars Express, directed by Mackenzie Crook, will see Jones play Colin Pillinger while Watson is his wife Judith.
The couple began developing the unmanned Beagle 2 probe to search for life on Mars while Pillinger was a professor of planetary sciences at the Open University in Milton Keynes. The probe went out of contact upon landing in December 2003, until it was finally spotted in 2015, after Pillinger died.
Crook said: “It’s a complete honour to be telling the extraordinary story… for my first feature film as director.”
