What also might keep us on the couch is the sense of a society changing, not so much at its heart as around its edges. ![]() The unfolding of their negotiations and the nature of the friendship underpinning them is not seat-of-your-pants televisual excitement, but it is the stuff of sustained intrigue – enough to keep us watching for six episodes, certainly. Philby’s treason is an often-told story, but Elliott is an unknown figure. It is a shock in the second episode to see him sweating through Elliott’s four days of interrogation, his savoir-faire disintegrating even as he steadfastly denies that he is a traitor. Pearce plays Kim Philby as if he were born to the role: He is arrogant but winning with it, the center of every party who can drink a bar dry without any faltering of control. Even at the eleventh hour, the operatives at SIS – a coterie of Oxbridge men who believe they instinctively understand one another – hope to emerge from this potential scandal with a gentlemen’s agreement. When Philby is rumbled, it is his chum Elliott who goes to Beirut to coax a confession and a deal out of his old friend that would allow him to retire gracefully to the country and save everyone’s face. So does Lewis, for that matter, with his Mona Lisa smirk and quietly clipped voice, both calculated never to display surprise. Both were clubbable, debonair, at ease and in no doubt of their own superiority.Įven by the standards of the game, Elliott plays his cards close to his chest. As portrayed by writer and showrunner Cary, Philby and Elliott were united by both calling and class. Even so, there is no doubting their privilege. A Spy Among Friends takes place in a series of dark offices and drawing rooms that, even on the small screen, look decidedly cold and frequently shabby. ![]() Philby was unmasked as a KGB agent in 1963. While the spies in Homeland were at the edge of the world, teetering on the brink of insanity, Elliott and Philby are at the heart of things, which is not to say it is particularly glamorous. Here he enters another secret world, but in a very different guise: He plays Nicholas Elliott, an operative with foreign security agency SIS, who also is the closest friend of Philby ( Guy Pearce). Lewis is best known on both sides of the Atlantic as Homeland’s Nicholas Brody, the Marine Corps sniper imprisoned and possibly “turned” by Al-Qaeda. A Spy Among Friends – two episodes of which are screening as part of the London Film Festival ahead of its debut on ITVX this fall – reunites Alexander Cary, a writer and producer on the long-running espionage series Homeland, with actor Damian Lewis, who also steps up as an executive producer of the new series.
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