A Legacy of Spies
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The BBC and MGM+ have announced landmark John le Carré series Legacy of Spies by award-winning The Ink Factory (The Pigeon Tunnel, The Night Manager) in co-production with Amusement Park Film (All Quiet on the Western Front) and in association with 127 Wall Productions and Paramount Television Studios.
Written by Stephen Cornwell (Message from the King, A Most Wanted Man, Unknown) with Clarissa Ingram, the series adapts le Carré’s best-selling novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and will also draw on additional material from A Legacy of Spies.
The 8 x 60’ drama for BBC iPlayer and BBC One in the UK and MGM+ in the US, is anchored by two-time Emmy and Bafta award winning Matthew Macfadyen (Death by Lighting, Succession, Deadpool) as master-spy George Smiley, Charlie Hunnam (Monster, Sons of Anarchy, The Gentlemen) as the British intelligence officer Alec Leamas, Daniel Brühl (All Quiet on the Western Front, Rush) as East German spy Jens Fielder and Devrim Lingnau Islamoğlu (The Empress) as Doris Quinz aka Agent Tulip.
I am… enthusiastic. A Legacy of Spies really pulls together a lot of threads of the Smiley-verse, connecting The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with Call for the Dead and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I have long wondered whether Legacy of Spies represented a retcon in terms of tying the older works together, or if le Carre had a strong sense of the background relationships during the writing of those earlier novels… continuity really meant something different before the internet era in which legions of fans could take deep dives into the text and ferret out either background continuity linkage or divergences from such.
Macfayden is an interesting choice; obviously I love his work dearly but he looks nothing like Smiley, a decision that continues the tradition set by Alec Guiness and Gary Oldman. The only Smiley that to my mind actually resembles the character from the book is Rupert Davies. I know I let this bother me more than I should, but George Smiley isn’t a character who should tower over the rest of the cast. In any case, quite looking forward…