Interview with Damien Lewis

How did A Spy Among Friends come about?

Alex Cary [writer] and I were friends from Homeland. He just approached me one day and said, ‘I've got hold of Ben McIntyre's book A Spy Among Friends, do you want to produce it with me?’ I had just read it on holiday funnily enough — I'm a fan of Ben’s — and so I said yes very quickly. And then I said, ‘What do you intend to do with it?’ He explained briefly the way he wanted to structure it, which was to take the book apart extensively — because the book doesn't lend itself obviously to adaptation; it's a sprawling, multi-generational, multi-country, book. But Alex's idea I thought was superb: he has brilliantly centred the structure of our six hours around this now famous four days in Beirut, when Nicholas Elliott is sent to interrogate his friend, bring him home and get him prosecuted — because the evidence against him is now overwhelming. That was also another part of the Elliott story that drew me to him — there’s this sort of tragic arc, with the best friend constantly enabling his best friend's treachery.

What was it about Nicholas Elliott that intrigued you?

He’s the best friend rather than Philby [played by Guy Pearce] who is obviously the rock star. In this country in particular, Philby and the Cambridge Spies is quite well trodden ground. Why make another programme about Philby, Burgess and McLean, Blunt? They're all familiar names. The one unfamiliar name is Nicholas Elliott. He of all of them was perhaps Philby’s greatest pal and he was also a young, rising star at MI6. He's less well known, of course, because he wasn't a traitor. He didn't betray his country. But the way we wanted to tell the Philby story was through friendship — to get in behind the facade and really explore what it might do to friendship, family, country and relationships between different intelligence agencies in different countries if you were to be up close to such a toxic and successful, long-running treachery, such as the one that Philby perpetrated over 30 years. Elliott became our sort of audience, our way in.

I also thought that he was an interesting man to play — in some ways, structurally at least, he's our everyman. But then we also have another character, who is also observing these two and the setting in which they play out their lives. That character is a fictionalised character played by Anna Maxwell Martin, Lily, who is a woman and is also from up north. She is very much not part of the gang of Oxbridge, privately-educated, essentially white, men. And so she performs the role of a magnifying glass, if you like, on to this world.

What was the culture of MI6 and the ruling class back then and has it changed much?

Well, I think it’s not actually that dissimilar from now. You know, I think all the intelligence agencies had a strong drinking culture, in pubs and weekend cricket games, sloshing down beer and good claret. It also took place in and out of the hoity toity gentlemen's clubs, the Whites, the Boodles, the Athenaeum... all these different clubs that these guys had easy access to because of where they went to school or university. They are the epitome of the ruling class of the period 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. For the whole 40, 50 years things remained pretty much the same, even with the advent of free sex and hippies and rock and roll in the mid 60s. This class of man and the places they inhabited continued to exist. And they still do, is the truth of it.

What motivated both Elliott and Philby in their actions do you think?

Well, it's a good question. I'll tell you a little story about when I was researching Homeland and I went to the Special Forces Club and I also went to Langley over in America and met CIA agents and MI6 agents. Each CIA agent I met spoke very clearly about having a moral crusade, a moral purpose. The MI6 guys I spoke to just said, ‘Well, I just thought it would be quite interesting.’ And essentially a bit of a giggle. It retained a little bit of that upper class, privately educated, amateurism. That very British sense of ‘this might be a bit of a caper and intellectually satisfying and do some good at the same time.’ I thought that was very telling of our two cultures. And probably quite accurate to the way in which we approach things generally.

Clearly, the difference between these two is for Elliott the thought that you would betray your country is unconscionable. I don't think it crosses his mind, even though lots of people later accused him of being on Philby’s side. Philby, on the other hand, is a charismatic, brilliant, adored, mercurial narcissist. He was introduced to the KGB or the NKVD as they were called then and I think he had a disdain for the English upper class. One that was realised through the prism of his experience of his dad, who was a famous Arabist at the time. I think he liked the elite, but he placed himself in an elite of one — because essentially, he alone succeeded in spying for 30 years.

Do you think that the culture among the British ruling class that facilitated Philby has changed, 70 years on?

Things have changed; of course they've changed. In fact it was a little unusual to have people from such an overtly privileged background be back in charge — It's a sort of old school privilege that Cameron and Johnson seemed to bring with them. Things had become more nuanced in the decades before them. It wasn’t just a conversation about private and public education —Tony Blair ran the Labour Party; he was privately educated. Thatcher, not privately educated, filled her cabinet with far fewer old school, public school types, didn't she? So they come and go. It's certainly true that recently they've been around in government and the cabinet. And they don't seem to have helped much.