A true Cold War story of betrayal unfolds in ‘A Spy Among Friends’

An A-list cast and a script based on an acclaimed bestseller help bring to life a true Cold War espionage drama in a series coming to MGM+.

In “A Spy Among Friends,” a six-episode limited series that premieres Sunday, March 12, Damian Lewis (“Billions”) and Guy Pearce (“Mildred Pierce”) star as lifelong friends and British spies Nicholas Elliott and Kim Philby, the latter of whom became the most notorious defector and double agent in history. Spanning the 1930s through the 1960s, the series tells of how Philby’s deeply personal betrayal at the height of the Cold War resulted in the gutting of British and American intelligence.

Filming the series in Romania proved to be a lesson in both past and current international affairs for Pearce, who not only immersed himself in Cold War history for the role, but also had an actual war beginning hundreds of miles away in Ukraine, where some of the crew were preparing to fight.

To play Philby, who died in 1988, the actor leaned heavily on Ben Macintyre’s historical novel, which excerpted some of Philby’s letters to one of his wives that Pearce felt provided clues to his true motivations.

“I did keep coming back to feeling that there was some genuine heartfelt compassion that he held for the ways of Communism in the early days, in his early days with Communism. So I hung onto that and I believe that’s true.”

“And I think the other thing that felt true to me,” he continues, “was in a way, even though he was part of the British establishment, his disdain for that British establishment. So even though when he ran off to Russia and probably didn’t want to give up that life that he had – you know, that elitist and the intelligentsia of Oxford and Cambridge and that very protected world of MI6 – I think always deep down, he held some sort of disdain for it because it probably did fly in the face of the compassion that he felt connected him to Communism in the early days.”