‘I’ll tackle Rox if he tries to go to Egypt’: Richard Roxburgh, Peter Greste and 400 days in a Cairo prison

Australian journalist Peter Greste (left) with actor Richard Roxburgh, pictured in the Nicholas Building in Melbourne. Photograph: Charlie Kinross/The Guardian

Richard Roxburgh would like to take this opportunity to apologise to audiences about to watch The Correspondent: “There is no escape from my face. For the entire sentence of the movie.”

The audience’s “sentence” lasts just under two hours – but for the film’s subject, Australian war correspondent Peter Greste, his sentence was seven years in an Egyptian jail. In some ways, though, it was really a life sentence: despite walking free in 2015, Greste remains, by decree of a kangaroo court in Cairo, a convicted terrorist. On a recent flight from New York back to Australia via Auckland, immigration officials refused to let him progress to the transit lounge.