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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 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 Vicki Power | Weekend Magazine for Daily Mail | November 25, 2022
With its moles, traitors, double agents and secret dossiers, the scandalous tale of the Cambridge spies is as electrifying as anything John le Carré ever dreamed up. It’s no wonder the story of five Oxbridge graduates secretly spying for the KGB during World War II and the Cold War has been adapted for numerous TV dramas.
But a riveting new six-part TV series takes a fresh approach to this astonishing tale of betrayal by looking at Kim Philby’s outrageous behavior and casting two huge Hollywood stars, Homeland’s Damian Lewis and LA Confidential’s Guy Pearce, in the lead roles.
First look photos here
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by Richard Godwin and Caroline Frost | Radio Times | November 22, 2022
Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce are among the most acclaimed actors of their generation. Lewis has transformed himself into a tortured US soldier in Homeland, a volatile Henry VIII in Wolf Hall, an obnoxious hedge-fund manager in Billions – and any number of Shakespearean roles. Pearce sprang from the Australian soap Neighbours into a wide-ranging career, with roles including a drag queen, action heroes and a lovelorn English King.
But neither man has anything on Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer unmasked as a Soviet double-agent as part of the Cambridge Spy Ring, which included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, and whose web of deception has been a subject of endless fascination since his exposure in 1962. Lewis sees Philby’s treachery as “part of British folklore.”
First look photos here
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by Simon Hattenston | The Guardian | October 29, 2022
They were the golden couple of British acting, but Helen McCrory’s death last year left her husband shattered. Now he is putting the pieces of himself back together – and finding a new creative energy.
The entrance to the private members’ club is so unobtrusive it is barely visible. I walk up the back stairs to a well-disguised roof terrace. A member of staff seems to know why I’m here, and shows me to a discreet table with barely a word. Damian Lewis is sitting there alone, tucking into a plate of sea bass. “Sorry, I couldn’t wait,” he says, looking up. “I was starving.” We move on to the veranda – an even more private spot. I half expect him to show me a secret code, tell me to consign it to memory, and walk away. It feels like a scene from a spy novel.
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