‘The Courier’ delivers real and fictionalized drama
Benedict Cumberbatch is known for playing extraordinary characters, from Marvel’s “Dr. Strange” to Sherlock Holmes.
Make way for his amateur, everyman spy Greville Wynne in “The Courier,” now in theaters and on premium VOD.
This time, it’s a true story: Wynne was an unassuming go-between for British intelligence MI-6 and Russian spy Oleg Penkovsky at the height of the Cold War.
“Greville Wynne was an ordinary man doing an extraordinary thing,” Cumberbatch says. “This true story is a very interesting, skewed way to telling a ticking-time-bomb spy thriller.”
“The Courier” has compressed the real-life story and changed some facts. “But you have a responsibility to honor the essence of what happened,” says director Dominic Cooke.
Here’s what to know about Wynne’s real history.
‘The Courier’ Greville Wynne was the least-likely spy
Wynne was a middle-class British businessman whose frequent travel to Eastern Europe attracted recruitment by MI-6 to serve as a liaison to highranking Soviet official Penkovsky.
A drink-loving bon vivante as portrayed onscreen, Wynne’s real-life salesmanship and naiveté made him perfect for throwing off serious suspicion.
“He came from a very humble background, but was always trying to better himself,” Cumberbatch says. “He started as a naïve amateur. Greville Wynne fit the bill simply as somebody who was taking business into Eastern Europe.”
Never formally acknowledged by the British government, Wynne wrote about his experiences in two self-aggrandizing books, “The Man From Moscow” (1967) and “The Man From Odessa” (1981).
Wynne was jailed as a spy
The moonlighting spy was arrested on a business trip to Budapest in November 1962 and taken to the Soviet Union. The film sees him arrested on a plane leaving Moscow and does not delve into his show trial for spying alongside Penkovsky in May 1963. Sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, Wynne spent 18 months in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, where he was subjected to beatings and torture.
Penkovsky either was shot or killed himself in prison – there are disputing accounts. But his leaked information on Soviet missile capabilities played a key role in President Kennedy’s strong, successful stance during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Wynne returned to Britain but was never the same
The unlikely British spy was freed in 1964 in exchange for Soviet spy Konon Molody. Wynne’s return to his middleclass London home – where his wife and child waited – made for a jarring scene in newsreels.
“His clothes were sort of shrinkwrapped around this skeleton,” says Cumberbatch, who spent three months losing weight and preparing to portray Wynne’s final months.
As the film alludes, life never returned to normal for Wynne, who battled the psychological effects of his incarceration. He divorced his wife Sheila before a second failed marriage. Wynne died of throat cancer in 1990.
“Think about going back to life after that intense drama,” Cooke says. “He did make a life for himself, but Greville Wynne did pay a big price for his service. No question.”