The north London home of Fifty Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson was raided by police late Thursday evening after a deceiving piece of art inside the residence alarmed a passer-by.
According to the Daily Mail, the £15.5 million Primrose Hill area residence was singled out when a machine gun was spotted by an observer in the basement of the household. But what looked like a deadly weapon was quite the opposite. The certified deactivated M16 rifle was gifted to the director as part of a contemporary art project.
“Police were called at 23:40 hours on Thursday by a member of the public, reporting that they had seen from the street, what they thought was a firearm, sitting on a desk by the window of a property,”; a spokesperson from the Metropolitan police explained. “Local officers and officers from the Met’s Firearms Unit attended and were let into the property to examine the firearm. It was confirmed that the firearm was a deactivated M16 rifle.”;
The director and her husband Aaron Taylor-Jackson were said to be out of the country as were the couple’s two daughters.
The Peace One Day M16 project challenged the biggest names of the contemporary art community to transforming fully decommissioned M16 rifles.
