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by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | December 1, 2022
Damian and A Spy Among Friends co-star Anna Maxwell Martin attended the ITVX showcase event in London back on November 15, 2022. View images from the event here. The event celebrated the upcoming December 8 launch of new streaming service ITVX, which will feature more than 10,000 hours of free programming, including Spy.
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by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | December 1, 2022
Damian popped into Jazz FM today and ran into Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, MBE aka The Black Farmer. Jones moved from Jamaica to the UK when he was a child. Inspired by his small farm on the Devon Cornwall border and the love of his father’s inner-city Birmingham allotment, he is a passionate supporter of British farming and bringing diversity to the food and farming industries. And Damian is a fan of Black Farmer’s sausages, perfect for a Christmas hamper!
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by ITVX | Twitter | November 30, 2022
Damian Lewis and Ben Macintyre discuss MI6 intelligence officer Nicholas Elliott. The new drama mini-series will be available for streaming on ITVX in the UK beginning December 8, BritBox AU on December 9 and MGM+ in 2023 in the US.
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by Charlotte Dean | Daily Mail Online | November 30, 2022
Guy Pearce has discussed filming A Spy Among Friends with Damian Lewis shortly after his late wife Helen McCrory‘s death in April last year. The actor, 55, said he could feel the Peaky Blinders actress’ ‘essence’ on set as they filmed the drama together, during an appearance on Wednesday’s This Morning.
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by Stephanie Bunbury | Sydney Morning Herald | November 30, 2022
For 30 years, Kim Philby worked for the British secret service MI6 while spying for the Soviet Union. He took classified documents home every night from the agency’s archive to be photographed by his handler; he worked diplomatic parties, club smokers and government departments in London and Washington, charming confidences from these intersecting inner circles; he was accused of spying, was investigated, exonerated and then carried on.
“This is the thing that kept striking me,” says Guy Pearce, who plays the debonair Philby in the new series A Spy Among Friends. “Every few days on set I’d think: ‘Thirty years he did this! Thirty years!’ It’s extraordinary.”
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by Mona Tabbara | ScreenDaily | November 30, 2022
A Spy Among Friends has sold to 117 territories for Sony Pictures Television. The series stars and is executive produced by UK star Damian Lewis, with Australian actor Guy Pearce and the UK’s Anna Maxwell-Martin also starring. The Cold War thriller is based on Ben Macintyre’s novel and tells the true story of follows British intelligence officer and KGB double agent Kim Philby, and is co-produced by ITV Studios and Sony Pictures Television. The series director is Nick Murphy.
It launches in the UK on ITVX on December 8, and has been picked up by MGM+ in the US, plus Canada (Prime Video), France (OCS January 3, 2023) and Germany (Deutsche Telekom). Sky Italia will broadcast the series in Italy, Monaco and Malta, and it will also air in India (SonyLIV), New Zealand (TVNZ), the Middle East (BeIN), across Central and Eastern European territories including Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Croatia, and Slovakia (HBO), Greece (Nova) and South Korea (Coupang).
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by Chris Harvey | The Telegraph | November 30, 2022
Friendship, according to the author Ben Macintyre, is the reason why Harold “Kim” Philby remains “the greatest double agent of all time”. The “third man” of the notorious set of Communist spies who met at Cambridge University in the 1930s exploited his closest friends to gift British and American secrets to Moscow, leading to the deaths of hundreds, possibly thousands, over 30 years as a traitor working for the KGB.
One of those friendships, with a man who protected Philby for many years, fellow MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott, is at the heart of a gripping new six-part ITV drama, A Spy Among Friends, based on Macintyre’s book of the same name. Fittingly, it stars Etonian Damian Lewis as Elliott, whose father was a famous headmaster of the school, and Guy Pearce as Philby.
Eton “was a more progressive, sort of democratic place when I was there”, notes Lewis, when I mention that John le Carré, who taught there in the 1950s, described Etonians as “a curse on the earth”. Yet was Elliott responsible in some ways for Philby’s crimes because he vouched for him? Lewis believes he was. “Elliot’s tragic arc is that he loves, adores, admires, and supports a man for his entire life, and defends him at critical points when he might have been exposed.
“And then he is the man that is sent to bring him back in a four-day interview in Beirut” – in 1962, Elliott was dispatched to the Middle East, where Philby was working as a journalist, to secure his confession after the spy had been confirmed as the third man by a Soviet defector. “Elliott is confronted by his greatest friend, his soulmate, his lover to all intents and purposes, platonically, who betrayed him and his country.” He never got over that betrayal.
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by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | November 29, 2022
Panel L-R: Anna Maxwell Martin, Damian Lewis, Ben Macintyre, Patrick Spence, Nick Murphy
Damian debuted his new six part series A Spy Among Friends at ITVX Showcase event on Tuesday, November 15, 2022 during a Q&A panel discussion. Joining him was actor Anna Maxwell Martin, author Ben Macintyre, director Nick Murphy and Patrick Spence. Damian told the moderator,
“We just wanted to get in behind the curtain of what an intimate betrayal between two friends [looks like]. It starts very much, and returns to, this friendship. I don’t want to give the end away, but there was a famous 4-day interview set in Beirut, an interrogation, which is the centerpiece of our drama that we come in and out of in a brilliantly orchestrated sort of time jumping way by Alex Cary who adapted Ben’s brilliant book. And that 4-day interrogation is the emotional heart of the show.”
Watch the full-length 12-minute video here. View images from the event here.
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by Peter White | Deadline | November 29, 2022
by Lesley Goldberg | The Hollywood Reporter | November 29, 2022
Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce-fronted drama series A Spy Among Friends has found a new home in the U.S. following Spectrum’s move out of original series. The spy thriller, which is a co-production with UK streamer ITVX, has landed at MGM+, the network formerly known as Epix.
The premium cable network/streamer has picked up domestic rights to the series and it will air in the U.S. in 2023. It comes after the series premiered at the London Film Festival and ahead of its British launch in December.
The six-part series was among the programs that were left without a home after Charter shut down its Spectrum Originals banner following the departure of executive Katherine Pope.
Pope departed cable service Charter to take over as president of indie studio Sony Pictures Television, which produces A Spy Among Friends. Pope previously bought the show during her time at Charter and now sold it to MGM+ in her new role atop Sony TV. The MGM-controlled Epix will be rebranded as MGM+ starting January 1, 2023.
“I’m very happy to be bringing our Cold War tale of friendship and betrayal to MGM+. They’re the perfect partners for us and I can’t wait for people to see it,” said Damian Lewis.
“Alex Cary has brilliantly adapted Ben Macintyre’s historical novel about friendship, loyalty, and betrayal. He, along with Nick Murphy, Damian Lewis, and the remarkable cast led by Lewis and Guy Pearce, have brought to life this riveting tale of two British spies whose deep personal bond and long friendship is challenged by duplicity and deception,” said Michael Wright, head of MGM+. “This series is emblematic of our new MGM+ brand and the rich, cinematic, and character-driven stories we aim to tell.”
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by Alex Wood | WhatsOnStage | November 29, 2022
Some Sondheim for Christmas!
The mega Sondheim tribute concert staged in the West End will be presented on the BBC and iPlayer, it has been announced. Dates and times for the BBC Two broadcast and subsequent iPlayer release are to be revealed by the Channel. UPDATE: Airing Saturday, December 31, 2022 at 5:35 pm on BBC 2. Available for streaming on BBC iPlayer shortly after broadcast.
The special event, which took place in February of this year, featured a bumper cast of Michael Ball, Helena Bonham Carter, Rob Brydon, Petula Clark, Anna-Jane Casey, Rosalie Craig, Janie Dee, Judi Dench, Daniel Evans, Maria Friedman, Haydn Gwynne, Bonnie Langford, Damian Lewis, Julia Mckenzie, Julian Ovenden, Bernadette Peters, Sian Phillips, Jon Robyns, Clive Rowe, Jenna Russell, Imelda Staunton, Charlie Stemp, Gary Wilmot and Michael D. Xavier.
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by Anita Singh | The Telegraph | November 29, 2022
Kim Philby’s career as a double agent was a betrayal not just of his country, but of the old boys’ network at MI6.
A new television drama about his treachery aims to inject some gender balance by inventing a female character who exposes the British intelligence services as a world of entitled, public school “dinosaurs”.
The drama, A Spy Among Friends, is an adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s bestselling book about the friendship between Philby and Nicholas Elliott, a fellow agent.
Damian Lewis plays Elliott, who has been blind to Philby’s betrayal. He gradually learns the truth through his dealing with Lily Taylor (Anna Maxwell Martin), a working class MI5 officer called in to investigate.
The drama, co-starring Guy Pearce as Philby, launches on December 8 on ITVX, the streaming service which is replacing the old ITV Hub.
The creation of Lily Taylor follows a trend for inserting fictional female characters into stories that, in their original form, had no place for women.
“This character enabled us to tell a particular story,” said Lewis. “About a generation of white, upper class dinosaurs, who’d been responsible for two world wars, failed intelligence missions, and had curated and nurtured our most famous double agent. The redemptive thing for Elliott is that he has the foresight and humanity to recognize in this young, female MI5 officer that here might be a way forward. He sees in her something rather brilliant – he sees the future.”
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by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | November 28, 2022
A Spy Among Friends will be available on ITVX on December 8 and BritBox AU on December 9. For those of us across the pond, the US release will be March 12, 2023 on MGM+ (formally Epix). Here are the episode titles and descriptions.
Episode 1: Boom-ooh-yatatatah
Description: In the wake of Kim Philby’s escape to Moscow, his closest friend in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6.), Nicholas Elliott, is under investigation by Mrs. Lily Thomas from the Security Service (MI5): Did he facilitate Philby’s escape because he’s also a traitor working for the Russians, or is it just that his judgement was clouded at a critical moment by their twenty-three year friendship? Or maybe, just maybe, he in fact had the last laugh having manipulated Philby to run to the bosom of the KGB for foreign intelligence purposes.