Still driving … They’ll be having a cup of coffee at a service station. How will Danny and Frances be spending Christmas? If you’ve lost the two central relationships, who would you be spinning Danny through? I preferred Charlotte and Ben going head to head, I don’t know whether they’d have the same spark as friends. The BBC have asked and my instinct is that it probably shouldn’t continue. Once Danny had learnt that his love story was real – which was the key question to answer, for me – and re-evaluated his relationship with Scottie through this world, it was whether to close everything off or decide he’d found someone new and gone on this new adventure. It was a relationship drama refracted through the prism of the spy genre.
I don’t have any desire to explore the real-world spy consequences of what was going on. London Spy ended with Alex’s mum, Frances (Charlotte Rampling), and Danny driving off to take on the establishment. Photograph: Joss Barratt/BBC/WTTV Limited People aren’t wrong to interpret things differently, but I don’t think Scottie has a bad bone in his body.Ĭharlotte Rampling and Ben Whishaw. The reaction is of sadness and grief – the love story he didn’t have. The reason people pulled away from him was that he knew they could never be a couple, and he realises that, in Alex, Danny has found and fallen for the younger version of himself. We had to reshape it because of the location. The American was meant to represent international espionage, although there was a peculiarity about it being quite so compressed. Because that scene was in a public place, it got reduced so the conversation didn’t feel forced. That episode was constructed around three warnings. The level of care and detail, and from people all over the world – they were beautiful pictures even if they were from people who’d watched the show illegally…Ī couple of burning questions: who was Clarke Peters? Huge shows like Sherlock or Doctor Who would get that, but I’ve never experienced anything like it. You’ve been Tweeting some amazing London Spy fan art. Why would you need to see a mirror version of yourself to connect with a story?
Gay people have been watching straight relationships and been engrossed by them for years. I’ve heard executives ask what the point is of having a gay relationship when it’s off-putting to so many people.
You’ve said: “It had to be for TV because, with a gay relationship at the centre of the story, it would have been impossible to fund a movie.” They disappear into the roles and you can’t see any of the work that goes into it. I loved Wolf Hall – Mark Rylance and Ben have the same magic. We’d love to say something was categorically a lie. We all kind of know which lies we were told, whether it’s about wars or government policy, but without the evidence, you can’t pin someone down. Accumulate data on how they spoke, then use this algorithm to test any statement they’d made. I took it to the extreme, running it without people’s consent.
If I’d moved into something topical like real-world terrorism, what would that have had to do with their relationship? That would have no resonance beyond being the thing that killed his lover. It was whether their love story was real: did Alex really love Danny? That was the key revelation. The big question wasn’t who killed Alex or anything about the spy world. When I wrote it, it didn’t cross my mind that he’d be alive. So you never intended Alex’s fate to be ambiguous? There wasn’t much I could do about that, but I was pleased because it meant the relationship worked. A lot of people tweeted me, really sincerely pleading for Alex to be alive. Danny and Alex were lost in very different ways, then found each other. Lots of people out there are struggling to find their way. Why have people responded to London Spy on such an emotional level?