Tamal Kundu
Peacock’s ‘Last Light’ is an action thriller series that follows Andy Yeats (Matthew Fox), a renowned Petro-chemist working for a major energy and oil company. Ironically, his daughter, Laura (Alyth Ross), is an environmental activist. During an emergency business trip to the Middle East, Andy discovers an elaborate plot that causes a global energy crisis that might be tied to his past. Meanwhile, his wife, Elena (Joanne Froggatt), is in Paris with their son Sam when widespread riots break out across Europe due to the crisis.
In London, where the family resides, Laura suddenly discovers that she is being followed. As a disaster of an unprecedented scale looms on the horizon, all members of the Yeats family make a desperate bid to reunite. ‘Last Light’ is a show that explores some of the direst issues of modern society, including climate change, energy crisis, and unstable geopolitical situations. If that has made you wonder whether the thriller series is inspired by actual events, we got you covered.
Is Last Light a True Story?
No, ‘Last Light’ is not based on a true story. It is a television adaptation of Alex Scarrow’s 2007 namesake novel, the first in the book duology. In a September 2022 interview with Coming Soon, director Dennie Gordon stated she was drawn to Scarrow’s book because of its universal themes. “I just thought it was so insightful. When something’s in the zeitgeist, and you feel like this is a story that has to be told now, today, it just spoke to me urgently. It’s a theme that we all cared deeply about, and we wanted to hurry and get the story out,” she said.
Gordon added, “It checked all the boxes for me. It was thrilling, it had tremendous heart, and it was punctuated by the opportunity for tremendous action, which I love doing. It was, for me, the chance to showrun a show and bring all the people together to do it from top to bottom. So it was very, very exciting. And we hit the ground running! The minute Matthew Fox said, yes, we were off.”
Actor Matthew Fox, arguably most known for portraying Jack Shephard on the ABC series ‘Lost,’ returns to screen with ‘Last Light’ after a seven-year-long hiatus. The series also marks his first television appearance in 14 years. Fox echoed his director’s sentiments in a September 2022 interview with CBR about what garnered his interest in ‘Last Light’ and Andy Yeats. “I’m not sure it was Andy so much as it was just the whole story,” the ‘Bone Tomahawk’ actor explained.
Fox continued, “I felt like the story is very timely — this notion of our reliance on fossil fuels and what the world has to do over the next decades, so I felt that that was timely. I think the concept of families being torn apart… I think that is always a source of great drama and narrative storytelling. So I felt like we have this family that, at its core, they love each other very, very much, and that is separated through this crisis, and then the quest of trying to put it back together again.”
“So I was really drawn to the sort of macro-elements to the story rather than specifically to Andy. He’s a bit of an enigma and was a challenge for me to play, but I was really drawn to the bigger macro-elements of the story,” the actor concluded. Furthermore, he shared he was excited about serving as an executive producer. Clearly, ‘Last Light’ is not based on a true story but an adaptation of a novel. Nevertheless, it does tackle several pertinent themes like family relationships, geopolitics, and the climate crisis in a realistic way.
Read More: Where Was Last Light Filmed?
