EXCLUSIVE: Outlander star Lauren Lyle has boarded Netflix‘s Corby Poisonings drama Toxic Town.
Lyle’s role is unconfirmed but she joins an all-star cast including Aimee Lou Wood, Jodie Whittaker, Robert Carlyle and Bridgerton’s Claudia Jessie. The series is being penned by Help and His Dark Materials scribe Jack Thorne and produced by Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones’ Netflix-backed Broke & Bones production outfit.
Lyle is probably best known for playing Marsali across three seasons of Starz smash Outlander opposite the likes of Sam Heughan. She has just won two BAFTA Scotland gongs for her titular lead performance in ITV’s Karen Pirie and is also starring alongside Saoirse Ronan in upcoming indie movie The Outrun from Nora Fingscheidt. Other credits include Vigil and Broken, both for the BBC.
Revealed by Deadline in August, Toxic Town tells of the scandalous waste spillages in Corby, Northamptonshire, and the ensuing legal battle that has been dubbed the ‘British Erin Brokovich.’ Following the closure of one of the largest steelworks in Europe in the mid-1980s, the council demolished the site as part of a program of urban regeneration, which involved transporting waste through populated areas via open lorries. In the late-1980s and early-1990s, the rates of upper limb defects in babies born in Corby were subsequently found to be three times higher than those of children born in the surrounding area, and 18 families filed a lawsuit that eventually ended up victorious in the UK’s High Court in 2009. A settlement was reached a year later.
Thorne, who penned similar Channel 4 series The Accident, has previously labeled the Corby Poisonings a “defining moment in history.”
Production kicked off over the summer under an Equity contract.