Fiction is full of bad guys we love to hate. But every now and then, things get a little more complicated in fascinatingly twisted ways.
The Iris Affair creator Neil Cross—who successfully redeployed Idris Elba from the wrong side of the law in The Wire to the right, with caveats, in Luther—has always been drawn to rewardingly amoral characters.
“I’ve read everything Patricia Highsmith has written, but I keep returning to the Ripley novels,” Cross says, referring to her magnificently gobsmacking 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley and its various jaw-dropping adaptations.”
“I’m fascinated by antiheroes, yeah, and there’s a lot of Ripley in Iris,” Cross says. “In the same way Highsmith used to sign her letters Tom, with Ripley as her avatar, I can have Iris as a woman be an expression of my psychopathology.”
Cross loves how Highsmith has us enact mental hijinks to side with her avatar.
“Without ever making any special pleading for them, Highsmith allows her characters to do morally abhorrent things, taking you along for the ride,” he adds.
“Why do I care what happens to this terrible person? Wanting him to get away with it? And yet I do. Somehow you are on their side, and it’s pure artistry.”
Under the sun
There’s a touch of Ripley, Luther or even Bond at his majesty’s least moral service, to Iris Nixon. As played by Niamh Algar, the Irish star of crime drama Calm with Horses and sci-fi show Raised by Wolves, she’s a gifted codebreaker who thinks nothing of breaking the law, or another person’s head, if she has to.
“Iris goes on this moral journey that’s very Highsmith, and I thought casting her was going to be a long, arduous and perhaps even thankless process like the search for Scarlett O’Hara,” Cross chuckles. “But Niamh just has this amazing presence that’s properly iconic, so we read one actor for the role, and it was never in question.”
In The Iris Affair, co-directed by Sarah O’Gorman and Terry McDonough from a screenplay by Cross, Susan E Connolly and Ian Scott McCullough, we meet Iris hiding out in Italy. She races between Florence, Rome and Sardinia after high-tailing it from the employ of The White Lotus actor Tom Hollander’s more overt bad guy, Cameron Beck.
Cameron doesn’t think he is bad. Like many Bond villains, he’s so sure he knows what’s best for humanity that he’ll stop at nothing to achieve his goals.
He press-ganged a boffin, Jensen (Game of Thrones’ big friendly ginger giant Kristofer Hivju), into building a vast supercomputer, dubbed Charlie Big Potatoes, that could change the course of future history.
“When we were designing Charlie, I thought we were going to use a miniature the size of a marrow and green screen,” Cross reveals. “But oh no, Terry was like ‘We’re going to build it on an enormous stage.’ And that kind of energy I find inspiring.”
Jensen lost his mind, and Cameron can’t figure out how to wake up the machine, which is exactly what he hired Iris to do.
Only she wigged out on realising the Skynet-style Armageddon the dormant AI could bring on. Hence, she’s on the run, using a variety of pseudonyms and any poor soul who trusts her—like philandering copper Teo (Another Simple Favour’s Lorenzo de Moor) or Iris’s young mentee, Joy Baxter (Meréana Tomlinson).
Shooting in Italy references Ripley and fellow amoral creations.
“I’ve got a very long-standing fascination with Hitchcock-esque dramas playing out under glamorous blue skies with good tailoring, lovely sports cars and people who are certainly more articulate than the human being you will encounter every day,” Cross says. “I’m an advocate for a lot of TV made in the 70s that was very bold, unafraid to use some really big ideas and be entertaining.”
There were perks. “On a personal level, it brought a great deal of pleasure going to work in the morning. Rome in June sure beats Shoreditch in February at 3am.”
Across time and space
The Iris Affair brings big ideas as well as hand-to-hand combat, natty disguises and (frankly far-fetched but delightfully bonkers) plotlines that revel in Iris’ willingness to cross lines and fight dirty. She is, after all, battling for her life and quite possibly the world, which is a touch more altruistic than Ripley.
While we’re on the subject of literary nods, keen-eared viewers might spot another. Charlie Big Potatoes’ real name—everyone loves a codename in this show—is Caliburn, which is the Welsh word for King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur.
“I first learned of it in an Anthony Burgess novel called Any Old Iron,” Cross says, clarifying when I ask if it’s related to Shakespeare’s Caliban. “I did an episode of Doctor Who [Hide] with [Luther: The Fallen Sun director] Jamie Payne, which was based on Quatermass. The house it took place in was called Caliburn.”
There’s another Doctor Who connection in The Iris Affair. Sacha Dhawan, who played the Doctor’s tireless nemesis the Master, is a blogger tracking Iris’s whereabouts who functions as the show’s Greek chorus before being dragged into the action directly.
“I love Sasha so much that I can’t even begin to articulate,” Cross says, though innocent bystanders might not have guessed. “Drunkenly on the way back from a dinner in Rome, I demonstrated to him some of the fight moves that we were going to do the next day, and quite a lot of American tourists thought there was a violent incident.”
Speaking of characters prone to violent incidents, does The Iris Affair take place in a shared universe with Luther, and will the two ever join forces?
“That’s not a question I’d anticipated, and I don’t think it’s a shared universe, but universes do intersect in surprising ways,” Cross grins.
Watch The Iris Affair, and this space…
