Emma Thompson to Play the Queen in New TV Drama

LONDON -- Emma Thompson is set to play the Queen in a new Sky Arts TV drama about the day she was confronted with an intruder in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace.

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Based on the real Palace break-in that took place 1982, Eddie Marsan will play intruder Michael Fagan, who was 31 at the time.

Fagan broke into the Queen's bedroom while the Queen was sleeping and the two are understood to have talked for a period of time before the monarch was able to raise an alarm.

Fagan was initially charged with the theft of wine, but eventually the charges were dropped. He subsequently spent several months in a psychiatric hospital and said he had been undergoing a breakdown after his marriage broke up.

The half-hour drama Walking The Dogs has been re-imagined by writer Helen Greaves and is part of a Sky Arts strand of one-off dramas called Playhouse Presents.

In the TV show the Queen and the intruder discuss themes of love, family and freedom and at one point the monarch offers Fagan a dog biscuit, explaining that it is all she has available. Russell Tovey plays Palace footman who also becomes involved.

The drama, which will be screened later this year, has not won the support of at least one of it's real life characters.

"It was just a moment of madness," the 61-year-old Fagan told The Telegraph newspaper. "For her to be dragged through the dirt by me isn't nice. And how can they make a drama? They don't know what happened in there," he said.