Lily is a “composite” of real people, an invention to carry the drama along. Anna Maxwell Martin plays Lily Thomas, an MI5 agent looking into what exactly happened. Pearce makes Philby’s charisma apparent for all to see, and makes the most of his range, whether that’s taking part in a West End song and dance or dealing with the fallout from his unmasking. Lewis is suitably ambiguous as Elliott, who carries with him the hurt of a jilted lover and the confusion of a man whose entire belief system is falling apart. There’s no denying that this is a fabulous cast. Photograph: Ed Miller/Sony Pictures Television Spy-on-spy spying! … Lily Thomas (Anna Maxwell Martin). It becomes a sort of espionage stew at this point, jumping around in time from the early days of Philby and Elliott’s friendship in the second world war, to MI5’s 1963 interrogation of Elliott, to work out who knew what about Philby and when. His close friend and fellow SIS (AKA MI6) agent Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis) is tasked with going to Beirut to retrieve Philby and extract a full confession, despite appearing to doubt the depth of his friend’s betrayal. It begins with the big reveal that Philby ( Guy Pearce) is a traitor who has been working for the KGB and feeding them intel for the past 20 years. It comes with a starry cast and what should be an irresistible tale of intrigue, double-crossing and suspense, stretched out over multiple locations from Istanbul, Beirut and London to Moscow and Ohio. This is one of the flagship dramas to launch ITV’s revamped online player and new subscription service. T he story of the notorious MI6 agent and Soviet spy Kim Philby has been told numerous times before, but A Spy Among Friends (ITVX) has a fresh bash at it, using Ben Macintyre’s book of the same name as its source and inspiration.
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