These photos show just how true to the real-life disaster HBO's 'Chernobyl' series is

• The Chernobyl nuclear accident is one of the most shocking and devastating catastrophes of modern times.
• This may be, in part, why the hype around the HBO and Sky series about the disaster has been so substantial.
• Series maker Craig Mazin said in a podcast that the intention behind the show was to make the scenes as true to the actual events of the nuclear catastrophe as possible.
• Many of the scenes, costumes, and characters bear an uncanny resemblance to their real-life counterparts.
• Visit INSIDER's homepage for more stories.

The Chernobyl nuclear accident is one of the most shocking and devastating catastrophes of modern times.

The events and following aftermath changed the world forever — so it's no wonder HBO and Sky's new series "Chernobyl" has been met with such phenomenal intrigue.

Series maker Craig Mazin explained that the intention was to make the events that unfolded in the show as true to the actual nuclear catastrophe as possible, according to a podcast he did about the series.

During the podcast, Mazin said that it was particularly important to him to represent the facts as accurately as possible because of those who really had to go through the events in 1986.

Read more:Real-life characters in HBO's 'Chernobyl' on the moment they found out about the world's worst nuclear-power-plant accident

While not all the details in the series are 100% historically accurate — the nuclear physicist Ulana Khomyuk, for example, is a fictitious character — the series' team made a real effort to recreate scenes, storylines, characters, and even individual conversations as faithfully as possible.

Read more: HBO's 'Chernobyl' series invented a main character to depict the world's worst nuclear power plant accident

Scroll down to see how closely stills from the series represent the real events of the disaster.

Those involved with the set studied drafts and photos of the city prior to the incident

Before the series came out, very few people were aware that Pripyat was the city that had to be evacuated after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, rather than Chernobyl itself — which lies outside the 10-kilometer exclusion zone.

They shot in a city in Lithuania that was built around the same time as Pripyat, part of which was also in Ukraine.

Special effects also helped to make the Pripyat depicted in the series look as real as possible.

The casting directors, make-up artists, and costume designers put in a lot of effort to ensure the actors resembled the real-life characters as much as possible

Lyudmilla Ignatenko, pictured above, is the widow of firefighter Vasily Ignatenko, who was one of the first responders to the Chernobyl incident and died of acute radiation poisoning just weeks later.

Viktor Bryukhanov, former director of Chernobyl nuclear power plant

Although Oleksiy Breus — the engineer who entered the control room of the reactor just hours after the explosion — criticized Bryukhanov's portrayal in the miniseries as "distorted and misrepresented", the physical resemblance between the actor and the character is uncanny.

Valery Legasov, chief of the commission investigating the Chernobyl disaster

A day after the second anniversary of the incident and one day ahead of announcing the findings of his investigation into the causes of the disaster, Legasov took his life.

Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union

Gorbachev was the last leader of the Soviet Union.

Mazin also tried to ensure the storyline was as accurate as possible, including the following trial

This photo shows the series' version of the trial of those responsible for the nuclear disaster one year after the accident.

The real-life version of the event, where Bryuhkanov, Anatoly Dyatlov, and Nikolai Fomin were tried

It's not just their positioning in the dock that's the same; even the curtain in the background was recreated for the series.

A lot of attention to detail went into the set design

The image above shows a block of graphite used as a moderator at nuclear power plants like the one in Chernobyl.

In one of the most striking scenes in the "Chernobyl" series, a firefighter picks up a block of graphite from inside the core after the explosion and burns his hand instantly as a result of the radiation.

The cameraman claimed on Twitter to have found a graphite block in a lab in Pripyat that hadn't been used in the construction of the nuclear power plant.

The control room in the series is also quite a faithful replica

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The series' creator, Craig Mazin, said in a podcast that Soviet Union's economy made it easy to find authentic costumes for shooting

There was only one kind of miner's helmet in the whole Soviet Union, which is why the outfits were so realistic.

While it may seem in parts like the script was exaggerated for dramatic effect, many of the lines were taken from the original events

The series doesn't depict what happened in the control room of the nuclear power plant on the run-up to the explosion.

Rather, spectators get a view of the reactor exploding from a distance.

Only then do viewers get to see that it was the technicians at the plant who triggered the devastating explosion during a safety test.

While it may seem as though the script for this scene was exaggerated by the scriptwriters for dramatic effect, in actual fact, many of the lines in the series were actually said in the control room on April 26, 1986.

In the series, nuclear technician Alexander Akimov said: "Don't worry, we did everything right. Something... something strange has happened." 

According to Mazin, this was actually what Akimov said in real life.