A Spy Among Friends review: all-star adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s bestseller

Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis in A Spy Among Friends

(Image credit: ITVX)

published 15 December 2022

The story of the notorious MI6 agent and Soviet spy Kim Philby has been told before, but A Spy Among Friends (ITVX) has “a fresh bash at it”, with mixed results, said Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian. Adapted from the 2015 book by Ben Macintyre, the drama opens with the “big reveal” that Philby (Guy Pearce) has been feeding intel to the KGB for the past 20 years. His close friend and fellow agent Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis) is despatched to Beirut to retrieve Philby and extract a confession; at which point the drama becomes “a sort of espionage stew”, hopping between times and locations in a way that isn’t entirely satisfactory.

The drama has all the “atmosphere, period detail and clipped dialogue” you could hope for, said Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard; but the script is rather clunky, with some points laid on with a trowel. There are “heavy hints”, for instance, that Elliott is secretly besotted with Philby – which has the unfortunate effect of plastering “another layer of repression” onto Lewis’s “already buttoned-up performance”; and Anna Maxwell Martin does little to brighten proceedings as a “relentlessly stony” fictional character.

I wasn’t expecting to like this “big-dick, big-money all-star drama”, said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. But it won me over. “At first it looks like one of those period dramas where everyone just honks at each other about ‘Cambridge’.” But “slowly, surely, it morphs into a stylish, moreish and brilliant, if understated show”.