Screen legend Richard Roxburgh and famed journalist Peter Greste in Perth to promote film The Correspondent

Screen legend Richard Roxburgh is in Perth to promote his latest film, The Correspondent, which tells the true story of Australian journalist Peter Greste, who spent 400 days in an Egyptian prison on fabricated terrorism charges.

While the movie from Red Dog director Kriv Stenders is harrowing at times, Roxburgh couldn’t be happier to show it to West Aussie audiences.

“It’s really wonderful,” the actor told The West Australian.

“I had a curious and magical spate of four years where I did one film in WA every one of those years in various beautiful places.

“So WA did start to feel like the second home; it’s such a great part of the world and it’s beautiful to be here with a film that I feel passionately about.”

Greste, who was working for Al Jazeera when he was first arrested in Cairo in late 2013, is also in Perth to promote the film.

He said reliving his incarceration wasn’t the toughest part about watching The Correspondent.

Greste said the movie’s depiction of the death of a colleague, BBC producer Kate Peyton, years earlier in Mogadishu, earned that distinction.

“It was Kate’s death that really I found quite difficult to watch,” Greste said.

“I haven’t spoken about it publicly, so to see that on screen in such a powerful way was pretty challenging, but, having said that, I’m also really pleased that it was there.”

Roxburgh plays Greste in the film, and said he “vividly” remembered following the story of the journalist’s incarceration at the time.

“The extraordinary intractability of it, it seemed impossible that anybody was ever going to get this poor guy out, who had just been doing his job,” the actor said.

These days Greste is a professor of journalism at Macquarie University, and the executive director for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom.

Earlier this year, he undertook a 21-day hunger strike to raise awareness around the incarceration of Egypt’s most famous political prisoner, Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah.

The activist has a cameo in the film, and Greste credits el-Fattah with saving his life while they were imprisoned together.

This story of survival is just one of the reasons Greste thinks The Correspondent is a must-see at the cinema.

“We’re seeing assault on journalism in the White House in ways that would have been unimaginable ... so if this story prompts people to have those conversations around media freedom, then I think it will have been worth it,” Greste said.

“But the one thing I do want to underline is that this is not a polemic, we never intended it to feel like a lecture on media freedom, it is, first and foremost, a damn good drama.”

The Correspondent is in cinemas from April 17, and you can read the full interview with Richard Roxburgh in STM in The Sunday Times.