HBO Casts Sagar Radia Opposite Meghann Fahy in 'The Trial of Louise Woodward'
HBO has added Sagar Radia to the cast of its upcoming limited series The Trial of Louise Woodward, pairing him with Meghann Fahy to play the parents at the centre of a case that gripped two countries in 1997.
Radia and Fahy will portray Deborah and Sunil Eappen, the American host family whose eight-month-old son, Matthew, died while in the care of an 18-year-old British au pair accused of shaking him to death. The series is based on that true story. Production on the five-episode series begins in August 2026, according to Deadline.
The show comes from writer and showrunner Matthew Barry, an alum of HBO's banking drama Industry, where Radia also built his reputation. Radia is best known to audiences as Rishi Ramdani, the volatile Pierpoint trader on Industry. His previous credits include the ITV medical drama The Good Karma Hospital, and he is also set to appear in Netflix's AI-themed thriller 2034, directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Fahy, meanwhile, has been a rising presence on HBO, making this a pairing that pulls two recognisable faces from the network's own roster into a period legal drama.
Susanne Bier, the Danish filmmaker behind The Undoing and After the Wedding, directs all five episodes. She executive produces alongside Barry, Frank Spotnitz, Emily Feller, Tobi de Graaff, Antoine Douaihy, and Anton TV.
Deadline first reported the series order in late July 2026, making this an unusually fast turnaround from announcement to cameras rolling. Limited series, meaning a self-contained story with a set number of episodes rather than an open-ended run, have become a preferred format for HBO when tackling real-life cases that have a natural beginning and end.
The Woodward case needs little reintroduction for anyone who lived through it. Louise Woodward, a teenager from Cheshire, England, was working as an au pair for the Eappen family in Massachusetts when baby Matthew suffered fatal head injuries. The subsequent trial, conviction for second-degree murder, and eventual reduction of the charge to involuntary manslaughter became one of the most closely followed legal proceedings of the decade, splitting public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic.
For Radia, the role of Sunil Eappen marks a shift from the high-energy fictional traders of Industry to a real person caught in a tragedy. For HBO, it is another true-crime limited series in a pipeline that has proven commercially reliable for the network.
No premiere date has been set.
