Martin Clunes is opening up about portraying disgraced BBC presenter Huw Edwards in the first-ever major dramatization of a scandal that rocked Britain.
The Wuthering Heights actor was in attendance at a London screening of 5’s two-part drama Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards on Tuesday, depicting the ex-anchor’s grooming of a young man in the lead-up to his criminal conviction on separate child abuse image charges. The creative team said they pored over reports, police files, and related paperwork, as well as speaking extensively with the victim, their family, and journalists at The Sun who first broke the news.
“I thought it was a challenge,” said Clunes. “Just the name ‘Huw Edwards’ is a story, but I didn’t know the [full] story until I read it. And it’s really weird using words like ‘good’ or ‘great’ and whatever, but I mean, it was a really, really good read. Not just because of the revelation of the content, but [writer] Mark [Burt]’s a brilliant dramatist.”
Edwards was regarded as one of the U.K.’s most trusted newsreaders and a staple of broadcasting, having headlined landmark BBC coverage on Queen Elizabeth II’s death and the London Olympics in 2012.
That was until 2024, when he was convicted for serious child sexual offences and exited public life entirely. It had come to light a year prior that the presenter, married and with children, was repeatedly soliciting explicit sexual photos from young men, as well as grooming a vulnerable 17-year-old.
He had also struck up an online friendship with a man named Alex Williams who, from December 2020 to August 2021, sent him messages containing child abuse imagery, which Edwards accessed, including Category A images, considered the most extreme. On these charges, he pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children in a London court and was handed a six-month suspended sentence.
Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards reveals an eerie connection — that the young man groomed by Edwards was put in contact with the famous presenter after meeting Williams through a dating app. Some have argued the show comes too soon after Edwards’ conviction, but the team at 5 felt vital to show the public “how grooming work sand the insidiousness of grooming,” said an exec at the event.
Continued Clunes about how the part came up: “It came in the usual way that scripts do, from an agent. My first thought was, ‘Michael Sheen’s busy,’” he joked, prompting laughter from the audience. He was asked about getting Edwards’ Welsh accent right: “I don’t really sound like him. [It’s] my version of him. That’s what it was ever going to be. But there’s enough out there, isn’t there? We watched him every night, and he sort of seeps in a bit.”
“My task is always just to breathe life into something with this, gather as much information as you can, especially about a real-life person, and then off you go [to] invest every moment with what you believe it to have been invested in,” he said.
Osian Morgan, playing ‘Ryan’ (not his real name), the person groomed by Edwards, said this role was his first chance to play a more sympathetic character after a string of antagonist parts. “I was really, really excited by this project,” he said. “And to play Ryan is not only one of the proudest moments in my journey thus far as an actor, but one of the proudest things I’ve ever done in my life. I’m hugely, hugely inspired by him. He’s taught me so much [about] me and how I live my everyday life,” he added, lauding Clunes as not only the best actor he’s worked with, but also the nicest.
Samantha Anstiss, CEO of production company Wonderhood Studios and executive producer on Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards added that seeing the real texts exchanged between the victim and Edwards was like “going into the heart of darkness.”
“These text messages were, in the most visceral, disturbing way, a very imbalanced relationship of power,” she began. “That starting point for us [was] to go meet the family and the victim, who is an incredible young man. I was struck by when I met him with his big smile and polite manner, how resilient he has been throughout this… We made sure that we worked in a trauma-informed way, and there was nothing that we did or said that was going to trigger any retrauma.”
“And Mark was amazing,” she continued about Burt, “because Mark said whatever changes Ryan wanted all the way through would have to be made. He was the absolute front and center of our production approach.”
Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards will air on Mar. 24 on Channel 5 and its streaming service My5.
