Beverley-born Anna Maxwell Martin on ITVX drama A Spy Among Friends

The story has been recreated for a small screen drama, A Spy Among Friends, which will be released on December 8 by the new free streaming service ITVX (which replaces ITVHub).

Beverley-born Anna Maxwell Martin, who has won praise for her roles as frazzled parent Julia in Motherland and the ice-cold anti-corruption copper DCS Patricia Carmichael in Line of Duty, stars alongside Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce.

Based on the New York Times best-selling book written by Ben Macintyre, the six-episode series dramatises the true story of Philby and Nicholas Elliott, a fellow spy and lifelong friend.

Maxwell Martin plays Lily Thomas, the only character in the programme that didn’t actually exist, she says, and who wasn’t even in the book. Lily works for MI5 and is brought in to investigate Nicholas Elliott's (Lewis) involvement in Kim Philby’s (Pearce) defection to the Soviet Union.

“She’s appointed because she's sort of a wolf in sheep's clothing,” says Maxwell Martin. “She looks very unassuming. She's a woman. I wear lots of dowdy, woolly tights! But she's really clever and she knows how to infiltrate what is going on with Philby.”

Maxwell Martin, 45, who attended Beverley High School in East Yorkshire, says: “Lily is a brilliant device really, thought up by Alex (Cary, writer), because she's a personification of how we will judge Nicholas Elliott and his actions. Then it morphs into a relationship.

“She's the antithesis of the world she finds herself in, the world that Elliot and Philby are in which is sort of toffs, for whom you’re doing the wrong thing by wearing the wrong tie. She's the opposite of that. She isn't bothered about tradition, or what’s the right way or wrong way. She's not from an elitist society at all, she's from the northeast. She's not upper class. So it’s very disarming for Elliott and that's why she's there. Then what happens is that morphs into a relationship with Nicholas Elliott, and then they work in tandem: you see Elliott’s relationship with Philby and then Elliot and Lily's relationship and how complex that is. He starts to understand her and she starts to understand him, and the complexities of his decision.”

Lewis adds: “This character (Lily) enabled us to tell a particular story about a changing of the guard. About a generation of white, upper-class dinosaurs, who'd been responsible for two world wars, failed intelligence missions, one after the other, and had curated and nurtured our most famous ever double agent. The redemptive thing for Elliott is that he has the foresight and humanity to recognise in this young, female MI5 officer that here might be a way forward — he sees in her someone rather brilliant; he sees the future I think.”

The world of spying was not completely alien to Maxwell Martin, as it was an interest of her late husband, the director Roger Michell, from whom she was separated and who died suddenly in September 2021. Maxwell Martin also appeared in his final fictional film, The Duke, which incidentally was partly filmed in Bradford.

Speaking of the show, she says: “I wasn’t completely ignorant because my late husband was obsessed with spying and prisoner of war camps and that kind of thing, so we have a lot of literature in the house.

“In fact, we had Ben's book in the house, so I knew a bit. I mean those weren't the kind of books I would have dipped into — you know, I'm too busy watching Married at First Sight to be reading that kind of thing.”

Cary was also a writer on the hit show Homeland, which starred Lewis in the main role of Nicholas Brody.

Speaking about A Spy Among Friends, Cary says the story is about Philby and Elliot, “and those last four days in Beirut” before Philby’s defection to Russia. “It's also about some of the key emotional moments over their 23-year friendship. All of that is chronicled in the book, but we expand a little bit on the book.

“In other words, the dramatic story that I'm trying to tell starts after the book has finished. It's really about what Elliott goes through in the aftermath of Philby’s defection from Beirut, having been sent out there to confront him and nail him to the cross, so to speak, and probably return with him. It's how he deals with that. That is a story that I have invented, but by connecting certain dots that are dots of reality.”

There has been a lot written about Philby, but what interests Cary about it?

“I think my interest lies in a period story of British history and a British friendship that is illustrative of a certain type of Englishman that is now deeply under the microscope — and should be.

“It’s a part of British society that I come from and it's always something that I've been aware of — my privilege and class and all of those things. It’s why I went to America once I got out of the Army.

“I thought, ‘I don't want to be part of this because I have to behave in a certain way where I feel pigeonholed.’ This story is about people from the same background and a friendship and just how toxic that was for them personally... and also for the world at large. I mean, seriously toxic. I thought it was interesting to examine that.”

A Spy Among Friends is released on ITVX on Thursday, December 8, the streaming service’s official launch date.