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MYNAME ISN’T MICH
THE COCKNEY SWAGGER, THE CHEEKY GRIN, THOSE TRADEMARK GLASSES... JOE COLE TELLS HOW HE BROUGHT MICHAEL CAINE’S WOMANISING 60S SPOOK HARRY PALMER BACK TO LIFE FOR A TV REMAKE OF THE IPCRESS FILE...
The Ipcress File starts as all good spy thrillers should – in a glamorous but dangerous city teeming with intrigue, a beautiful naked woman in a bath, and our hero lying in bed with a rather self-satisfied grin on his face. But something is amiss; everything looks blurry. And then he puts his glasses on.
Fans of the original film, starring Michael Caine, will immediately recognise this camera trick as a nod to the classic screen version of the Len Deighton novel. It says a lot: not only is this The Ipcress File mark two but also that while the spy in question, Harry Palmer, may have shades of James Bond, he’s not a superhero – he has very human flaws.
The film came out in 1965, three years after the book was published, and won immediate iconic status as well as three BAFTAS. Although it was made by many of the same people who had started the Bond film franchise, audiences lapped up its ‘anti-bond’ kitchensink realism. Caine went on to play working-class spy Harry Palmer in four more films.
There will be many now who will ask, why remake this classic? But after they’ve seen this new sixpart adaptation for ITV, they are just as likely to ask why it took so long. Harry Palmer is reborn for a new age; a fabulous mix of spy intrigue with delicious 1960s glamorous nostalgia.
‘I knew we had to do something with these stories before anyone else did,’ says producer and director James Watkins, who co-created the Mcmafia series and who has been working on the Ipcress project for eight years. ‘Harry Palmer is one of the greatest spy characters that has ever been created and he takes us into the world of the 1960s, a time when everything was on the cusp of change.
‘It is, hopefully, a twisty, sassy, gripping spy story, but baked within it are collisions in a world of social mobility, with a workingclass central character who lives by his wits.’
Stepping into the substantial spectacled figure of Harry is Joe Cole, who found fame as a young Shelby thug in Peaky Blinders and has continued to have success as a crime boss in
Sky’s Gangs Of
London. He has the cockney swagger, the cheeky grin and just the right undercurrent of undeclared anger to convincingly portray the unlikely hero.
‘It was only through talking to family members that I realised how iconic this character is,’ admits Joe, 33. ‘I read the book and watched one of the films but then stopped because I started worrying that I’d try to do a Michael Caine impersonation without realising it. He has such a presence that I had to try to erase what I’d seen from my memory, because I needed to put my own stamp on it.
‘I’ve got big shoes to fill but this character isn’t too far from home for me. He’s quite a modern man who cooks and likes books. I can understand him. I like that Harry uses humour almost like a weapon. He is quite facetious and playful, with a real swagger to him. He reminds me a bit of my grandad in that way. He is a working-class guy operating in a world where most people are upper class. He is also hyper-intelligent, and that’s fun.
‘One of the interesting things has been to try to not make him a d*ck. We have to tread a careful line; we need him to be likeable even as he’s pushing people’s buttons. We also live in a very different world now compared to then, particularly when it comes to things like how women are treated – so it certainly made playing some of that material a challenge.’
The story begins in West Berlin in 1963. Harry is an Army corpo
ral working in the British sector of the city who is bored with his duties, which include sorting out quarantine arrangements for the general’s dog. He’s separated from his wife, after the tragic loss of their baby, and is spending his spare time romancing the ladies and selling contraband on the black market – until he’s caught and sent to a military jail in England.
This is the height of the Cold War and Britain and America are allied against the Soviets to develop the best nuclear weapons. Then a government scientist working on new plans for a neutron bomb goes missing, but the British secret service doesn’t want its allies to know. A secret team of spies, who go under the name War Office Operation Communication (WOOC) – headed by William Dalby, played by Tom Hollander – are tasked with getting the scientist back. Their only lead is a man nicknamed Housemartin, who trades in goods and humans. And he’s someone that Harry knows from his Berlin days.
The first scene of Harry and Dalby together, in which these two clever and cynical men attempt to make a deal for Harry’s assistance in the mission, is a masterclass by award-winning writer John Hodge, whose film credits include Trainspotting and The Beach.
‘I wanted to do this series because of the wit,’ says Tom Hollander, 54. ‘Dalby is fun to play because he’s sort of the headmaster but he’s also conflicted and slightly jaded, so there was lots to hold on to. When they meet, Harry is trapped because he’s in jail but, in a way, Dalby is trapped too. They attack each other as class enemies but as time goes on, they are actually dancing on the same little pinhead.’
Dalby’s team is made up of middle-class ex-public schoolboys such as Chico (Joshua James), and also some surprises. Lucy Boynton plays Jean Courtney; in the book and original film she was a secretary as well as a spy. In this series she’s given a much bigger role.
‘I was just excited to be in Jean’s shoes, I’ve never felt cooler,’ says
Lucy, 28. ‘She’s an incredibly
intriguing character in the book but you don’t learn much about her. Having six episodes to play around with here, Jean gets to have her own presence and personality.
‘She is very bright – she studied languages at Oxford – and really good at her job. There is a lot to unpack as she is a young woman balancing all sorts of societal expectations versus this double life as an agent. We meet her as she’s having to make a decision about her wedding. In her work she finds so much freedom and intellectual stimulation, and she doesn’t want
to give that up.’
To help in their efforts to get the scientist back, Jean contacts a new source in the CIA, Paul Maddox, portrayed by British actor Ashley Thomas, who’s appeared in legal drama The Good Fight. Maddox is an African-american agent who, like Jean and Harry, is having to be twice as good to prove himself in the hierarchical world of the spy service.
‘Right from the off Maddox and Jean have a connection because of how society deals with them both; they have an immediate understanding of each other,’ says Ashley. But is he as helpful as he seems? Knowing who can be trusted is something that will keep audiences on their toes throughout the series.
In an effort to find out who’s behind the kidnapping, the team travel far and wide across the globe. But for budgetary reasons, the series was mostly filmed in Liverpool and Croatia. ‘London is now too clean so Liverpool filled in for most of our British scenes,’ says James Watkins. ‘The team’s offices were filmed in a former school. We also created an American
diner off the A55 in Wales, complete with period Cadillacs.
‘Croatia doubled for many of our locations. Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie was filmed in Zagreb, and other parts of our Berlin were shot in Rijeka. Split doubled for Beirut. We used the countryside in the winter to film a car in deep snow in Finland, while the mountains there doubled for America. We even created a South Pacific atoll at a helicopter base near Split.’
A huge amount of thought also went into making the show feel authentically 1960s. ‘We spent a lot of time looking at Pathé footage and took inspiration from there,’ says James. ‘We’re shooting on digital film but we wanted to make it look a bit dirtier. So we have lots of peeling and distressed walls – our wall would never be brilliant white but ivory with some dirt on it. The way the film chemicals were processed in those days would deepen colours, so we’ve made buses and phone boxes a deep red.’
While spies and subterfuge will always be with us, events in and around Ukraine over the last few weeks have given the series a relevance never imagined by the show’s creators when they started making it. But the series is also pure escapism, and the plan is that if it’s popular enough, there will soon be more of Harry Palmer.
‘I’m sure it wasn’t all as glamorous as it looks but we had a blast exploring their lives vicariously,’ says James. ‘And you can’t beat a British spy story, can you?’
‘Harry uses humour almost like a weapon’