Lily James' character Peggy Piggott says that she hasn't 'done much actual fieldwork yet' and stomps straight through the top of a barrow. Carey Mulligan (35) plays landowner Edith Pretty (56) while archaeologist Charles Phillips (38) is played by Ken Stott (66) and Stuart Piggott (29) by Ben Chaplin (51), which changes the dynamics between them. The ages of various characters get a bit jumbled up too. Two women who worked as photographers on the dig – Mercie Lack and Barbara Wagstaff – are chucked out of the story entirely, and replaced by Johnny Flynn's love interest Rory Lomax, who didn't actually exist. Netflix Did everyone in The Dig actually exist?

So what exactly was invented for The Dig? ' John Preston's novel departs from the truth in a lot of aspects and doesn't purport to be absolutely accurate, so the scope for departing from historical accuracy was already there,' director Simon Stone told the BBC. It does take some liberties with what actually happened though. What started as a small investigation into mounds on land which had been farmed for centuries turned up the most extraordinary archaeological find of the century in Britain, and added a new set of national symbols to the English imagination.īut how much of The Dig is actually true? It's certainly very true to the local landscape, being shot close to the original excavation sites and taking care to give Ralph Fiennes's Basil Brown a fairly good Suffolk accent rather than talking like your common-or-garden ooh-arr bumpkin.

A thoughtful reconstruction of an archaeological dig somewhere in deepest Suffolk feels like quite unlikely material for one of the first big Netflix hits of 2021, but The Dig has turned out to be exactly that.Ĭarey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Lily James and Johnny Flynn feature in the film based on John Preston's 2007 novel, also called The Dig, which follows the excavation of burial mounds at the Sutton Hoo estate in 19.

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