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THE spy thriller Counterpart brings new meaning to the term double- crossed.

The American drama centres on a UN employee who discovers the agency he works for is hiding a gateway to a parallel dimension that was accidentally created in a Cold War experiment gone wrong.

JK Simmons plays Howard Silk, the lowly cog in the bureaucratic machinery of the Berlin- based UN spy agency, but everything changes when he meets his “other” – Howard Prime ( also Simmons). With 30 years of different choices and their consequences behind them since their paths diverged, each represents what could have been for the other. But there’s not much time to dwell on the past, or the future, with an assassin from the other dimension on the loose. Actor Harry Lloyd had just moved home to London after two years working in the US on the TV series Manhattan when the project turned his attention back across the Atlantic.

“The day all the furniture arrived I was offered the part ... but it was one of those scripts, you read them every now and again. It felt like some fantastic 20th century novel I’d never heard of,” he says. “Despite the logistical challenges it was such an easy decision. It’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever done.”

Best known for his role as Viserys in season one of Game of Thrones, including the memorable scene where his character was killed off by having melted gold poured over his head, Lloyd plays Peter Quayle, the spy agency’s inept director of strategy.