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The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
by Peter White | Deadline | April 16, 2023
EXCLUSIVE: A Spy Among Friends, the story of British spies Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott that stars Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce, recently premiered on MGM+. The series, which is produced by Sony Pictures Television, is based on Ben Macintyre’s eponymous book. Alexander Cary, who executive produced Lewis-fronted Homeland, created the A Spy Among Friends TV series.
Cary and Lewis, who also executive produced the MGM+ period drama, were at Deadline TV Contenders to talk up the show. They are now turning their attention to more Macintryre books for the small screen.
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Informed and Entertaining Conversations with Key Creatives and Talent
by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | April 16, 2023
Damian joined Peter White (Deadline) and Alexander Cary via videolink as they spoke onstage at the A Spy Among Friends panel during the Deadline Contenders television event at Directors Guild of America on April 16, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. View more images in our Gallery here.
Deadline’s Contenders Television, where the top networks and streamers are showing off their wares and Emmy hopefuls, continued this Sunday with 20 more panels after a chock-full Saturday featuring some of the best and brightest series this awards season. View the 15-minute video of the panel discussion here.
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Critical and Remarkable Intelligence Operations
by Staff | Sky History | June 3, 2021
Damian Lewis: Spy Wars is available now on History Play. Starring Damian Lewis in his first factual role, Damian Lewis: Spy Wars reveals remarkable true stories behind the most gripping and significant international spy operations of the last forty years. Now available on HISTORY Play, Amazon Prime UK subscribers can watch the whole series for just £0.99 along with other award-winning Sky HISTORY documentaries and factual series.
A first in the worldwide factual genre, the new series focuses on many of the most critical and remarkable operations which have defined intelligence warfare. Damian explores the action and the context of key incidents which, in several instances, brought the world to the brink of war. By presenting an all-encompassing 360-degree perspective, each case is unpacked by experts and former spies on all sides: ex-Mossad, ex-CIA, ex-KGB and ex-MI6. Damian provides an unprecedented insight into the spy operations which literally shaped today’s geo-political climate.
As part of the Smithsonian Channel family, you can now stream Spy Wars with Damian Lewis via CBS All Access/Paramount+ here beginning March 4, 2021. Paramount Plus is both a new video streaming service made for a global audience, and a rebranding of the existing CBS All Access service.
Visit the Smithsonian Channel here for more information about the series.
*Spy Wars is also available to stream on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Google Play, and Vudu.
For fans in Germany and Austria, here is how you can watch the series in your country.
As part of the Smithsonian Channel family, you can now stream Spy Wars with Damian Lewis via CBS All Access here. Plans are as low as $5.99/month and you can start a free trial with your first 7 days complimentary. You can cancel or change your plan at any time. Watch all 8 episodes in 7 days! Find out episode information here.
Visit the Smithsonian Channel here for more information about the series.
*Spy Wars is also available to stream on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Google Play, and Vudu.
For fans in Germany and Austria, here is how you can watch the series in your country.
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Watch All 8 Episodes in 7 Days For Free. Here’s How.
by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | May 27, 2020
Watch Damian Lewis: Spy Wars instantly on NOW TV. The series is streaming until October 6, 2020. Want to watch for free? Start your 7-day free trial of NOW’s Entertainment Pass, then it auto-renews at £8.99 a month, unless cancelled. Watch all 8 episodes in 7 days! Find out episode information here.
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Espionage in the Spotlight
by Dorothy Rabinowitz | The Wall Street Journal | March 19, 2020
Smithsonian Channel’s series tells shockingly true stories of the clandestine variety. In 1968, a loyal officer of the KGB is so shaken by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that he becomes an operative for British and American intelligence—one, “Spy Wars” reveals (begins Sunday, 8 p.m., Smithsonian Channel), destined to be of historic importance. This is the saga of Oleg Gordievsky—subject of the first episode of this eight-part weekly series, and a rich portrait it is. When his role of many years as a spy for the British and Americans finally becomes known to the Kremlin, quick exfiltration becomes an urgent necessity. His 1985 getaway in the trunk of a car driven by unflappable MI6 agents, who get him safely to Finland despite suspicious Russian border guards—and the howls of their alert dogs, who quiet down when the car’s driver throws them a treat—is an escape sequence to cherish.
In 2001, Robert Hanssen—one of the FBI’s most trusted agents—is unmasked as the mole who had, for 20 years, betrayed the identities of American assets in the Soviet Union and then Russia, thus ensuring their deaths at the hands of execution squads.
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Spy Wars with Damian Lewis: The Man Who Saved the World (Full Episode)
by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | March 15, 2020
Click here to watch video if playback below does not work.
At a time when the Cold War spying game was in full swing, Oleg Gordievsky was one of the KGB’s rising stars…and biggest traitors. For years, he provided top-secret Russian intelligence to the British, but he is best remembered for risking his life in 1983 to pull the world back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. Presented by host Damian Lewis and backed by firsthand accounts by Gordievsky himself, we detail the spy’s incredible career as a double agent and his gripping defection out of Russia.
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Official Press Release, Trailer, and Episode Guide
by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | February 12, 2020
NEW SERIES HOSTED BY THE EMMY® AND GOLDEN GLOBE® WINNING ACTOR TO PREMIERE SUNDAY, MARCH 22 AT 8PM ET/PT
Where to watch streaming: Hulu Live, iTunes, Amazon Prime, fuboTV (free 7-day trial), YouTube TV w/Smithsonian Channel, and Vudu.
NEW YORK – February 12, 2020 – Smithsonian Channel is set to investigate some of the most shocking and explosive cases of espionage over the last 50 years. SPY WARS WITH DAMIAN LEWIS features the incredible true stories of spy wars fought in the shadows, from the turbulent years of the Cold War to the Iran Hostage Crisis and the discovery of a complex web of sleeper agents living in the U.S. – a major inspiration for the plot of The Americans. Each episode of this new eight-part series sees host Damian Lewis revealing these remarkable tales of the secretive world of government intelligence, surveillance and international conspiracy plots with interviews from the experts and eyewitnesses that lived through them. SPY WARS WITH DAMIAN LEWIS premieres Sunday, March 22 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Smithsonian Channel.
The series premiere episode, THE MAN WHO SAVED THE WORLD, recounts the story of Oleg Gordievsky – a KGB agent who may have singlehandedly averted World War III. Posted to the Soviet embassy in London by the KGB, Gordievsky would become disenfranchised by the Soviet agenda and, in a shocking move, flipped to become a double agent for British intelligence MI6. What was to follow was a years-long effort by Gordievsky to pass Soviet intelligence to the British, all but preventing a nuclear Armageddon between the Soviet Union and the West.
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From Espionage to History
by Debashine Thangevelo | Cape Argus / IOL / International | November 4, 2019
Damian Lewis is a recognizable face on the big and small screen. Of late, he has been praised for his roles as King Henry VIII in Wolf Hall and Bobby Axelrod in Billions. He was also cast as Steve McQueen in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood. And let us not forget his role as Nicholas Brody in Homeland.
Having covered a gamut of genres, from espionage to history, it does make his latest stint as a narrator for History’s Damian Lewis: Spy Wars almost surreal.
“This Mossad mission, I’m sure 98% of people watching won’t have heard of this story. So, I think it’s a little glimpse through a window of what they did; it’s an incredible story. You will sit and watch and be utterly engaged. I think that’s true of all our stories. Even the Argo story – we come in from a slightly different angle with a bit more backstory, from the intelligence part of it rather than the film making aspect of it.”
On being a part of this project he adds, “As soon as you put yourself in front of a camera, or in front of an audience, as a performer, there’s a whole intricate web of thoughts that run through your head – how you want to be presented and how can you successfully be a credible part of your show, your story, whatever it is – and we had to work quite quickly.”
“I was flying in and out of New York from Billions and we had a budget, obviously, we had to be aware of.”
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Damian Makes His First Documentary Spy Wars With His Brother
by Lisa Campbell | iNews | October 4, 2019
Few British actors have set foot inside Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, but as the star of the American spy thriller, Homeland, Damian Lewis was granted unprecedented access as part of his research.
While he jokes that his meeting with the director of the CIA, John Brennan, is “classified”, the story demonstrates his ability to get under the skin of characters through keen observation of the tiniest details. He describes the “incredibly poker-faced field operatives who had revealed only the smallest increments of expression and emotion, until Brennan walked in and the temperature in the room rose instantaneously.”
It’s an experience that stood him in good stead for his latest project, Damian Lewis: Spy Wars, which also marks his first foray into factual television.
The eight-part series – the first to come out of Lewis’ newly-launched Rookery Productions – airs on History from Monday in the UK and showcases the true stories and remarkable characters behind some of the most important international spy operations of recent years.
“I’ve done a lot of research over my career for Homeland and a movie I made, Our Kind of Traitor, and have read my John le Carre like everyone else. I enjoy the genre and thought it was an opportunity to look behind these popular stories and find out something a bit more intimate and personal about the people themselves, their decisions and the ramifications on global politics,” he says.
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Spies Next Door
by Mansha Daswani | TV Real, World Screen | October 3, 2019
Damian Lewis talks to TV Real about what appealed to him about the docudrama, which is being rolled out by A+E Networks.
Lewis already knew a fair bit about espionage before signing on to executive produce and present the A+E Networks U.K.-commissioned series Spy Wars. He did, after all, play an MI6 agent in Our Kind of Traitor, based on the John le Carre novel, and a U.S. prisoner of war who returns home and is hailed as a hero as he secretly plots a terrorist attach in Showtime’s Homeland. Damian Lewis: Spy Wars sees the British actor recounting notable stories of espionage from the last four decades, spanning from the Cold War all the way through to the contemporary war on terror. The eight-part series produced by Alaska TV in association with Lewis’s own Rookery Productions sees him speaking directly to camera and features expert interviews and dramatic reenactments.
TV REAL: Tell us about the genesis of Spy Wars. How did you come to be involved in the show?
LEWIS: My brother [executive producer Gareth Lewis] was already involved, he was going to be directing parts of it. He said, Do you want to do this? I said, I don’t really do factual, I’m not a presenter. But I got sucked into these eight spy stories. I came on as a co-producer and tried to get to the bottom of what makes a man or woman do heroic or traitorous things on behalf of their country. That was it really. It came to me by invitation and my curiosity was tickled.
TV REAL: As you got into the details of these stories, what were some of the things that surprised you?
LEWIS: To be honest, a lot of what happens in the spy world is pretty unscientific. There’s still quite a lot of buccaneering and derring-do, if you like. It’s not risk-averse. It’s pro-risk, and often it can seem a bit chaotic, a bit ramshackle, and even at times a bit amateurish. Exotic words like “dead-drop” and “brush past” and things like that can simply be someone walking into a supermarket with the same plastic bag and putting it down and then each leaving with each other’s bag. It’s not exactly high-tech. While you’re looking for a slightly more sci-fi, James Bond aspect to these stories, they don’t exist. So the challenge for us was how to make the stories gripping and suspenseful. We tried to get into the minds of the individuals and what was at stake for them. What are the documents in that bag? What happens if that individual is caught? Why is the individual doing it? If the individual is a KGB officer and he’s caught, he’s going to be executed. If he’s a Western intelligence officer, he’s going to be imprisoned for life. We were trying to find out why these men and women are motivated to do these things. The motivation is often grubby and personal. It can be for simple revenge, a need to be heard, a need to belong to something, to be loved. People turn traitor for all these different reasons. So the surprise was constantly the grubbiness! And the desperation that’s there. And the extreme risk that these people are prepared to take in order to keep going.
