Stephen Burke's 'Maze' acquired by Netflix

Released by Lionsgate last year, Stephen Burke's Maze was the most successful Irish feature film at both the Irish and Northern Irish box office, achieving an all-Ireland gross of over 1 million dollars.

Now, the film is set for a whole new lease of life with the VoD rights of this critically acclaimed thriller being bought by Netflix.

Tom Vaughan-Lawlor is the star of the show. Just when we though his death in Love/Hate was the last we'd see of Nidge, he had a massively successful string of career hits including starring in 'Avengers: Infinity War.'

Funnily enough, the man himself spoke exclusively to Hotpress last year, about his new role as Larry Marley, the chief architect of the escape of 38 IRA prisoners from HMP Maze, a high security prison in Norther Ireland. Speaking on his new venture he said; “I think what Stephen Burke has done is very even-handed. If it were just a film about the Maze prison escape, I wouldn’t have wanted to do it because it wouldn’t be saying anything new or interesting. The escape is an entry point, a conceit really, that allows Stephen to tell the story of two men – Larry Marley, the inmate, and Gordon Close, the prison officer - from opposite sides of the divide whose internal ideological conflicts turn out to be exactly the same.

They have a lot more in common than they realise, which feeds into what I believe is the film’s over-riding message, that being: ‘Conflict can only be resolved by people coming together and having conversations and dialogue.’ That process can be a hard sell to your own side, which is why Margaret Thatcher insisted that, ‘We don’t talk to terrorists’ while opening up channels of communication with the IRA. Despite their public demonisation of them, the American government eventually spoke to the Taliban and are probably now in some form of contact with ISIS.”