Paddy Considine, America Ferrera, Alex Hassell and Kit Harington to lead Army of Shadows
Co-produced by STUDIOCANAL and Two Cities Television and written by Ronan Bennett (The Day of the Jackal, MobLand), filming has begun in Manchester, Liverpool, London and Paris for the new drama series.
What we know about Army of Shadows
From the press release, we learn it is inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 film and Joseph Kessel’s seminal book of the same name, which famously dramatised the emergence of the French Resistance to the Nazi Occupation of France during World War 2. Ronan Bennett has crafted a tale of how resistance takes shape in an occupied Great Britain. The series has been developed and produced with the support of the Melville family and the Kessel estate, which is controlled by the Irish Red Cross.
So, it’s an alt-history tale in a rather crowded space. More particularly:
Britain looks almost normal, but the flags are different, the news is careful, and nobody says certain things out loud anymore. But everyone can feel it. Somewhere beneath the surface of ordinary life something has gone terribly, quietly wrong. Out of the shadows emerges a former soldier known only as Berry, who starts building a secret resistance network. He knows one thing above all else: don’t act before you’re ready. An unlikely group starts to coalesce around him — people who’ve decided they can’t look away any longer: a soldier, a student, a radiographer, a journalist. Ordinary people, with ordinary lives, making an extraordinary and irreversible choice.
Against them: a state with unlimited reach, a ruthless minister who’ll do whatever it takes to maintain “order”, and an American intelligence operative called Jessie, who is very, very good at her job. Army of Shadows is a tense, propulsive thriller about what resistance actually costs. If your country were occupied, what would you do?
The case are Paddy Considine(House of The Dragon, MobLand), America Ferrera (Barbie, The Lost Bus), Alex Hassell (Rivals, Wasteman) and Kit Harington (Industry, Game of Thrones). Lisa Gunning (Black Doves, The Power) will direct all six episodes.