Matthew Macfadyen Will Star As George Smiley In A New John Le Carré Adaptation

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Produced by the late author’s sons, this Succession alum is set to lead Legacy of Spies

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From Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to The Night Manager to The Little Drummer Girl, you can’t go wrong with a John le Carré adaptation. Next up is one of the late author’s final novels, A Legacy of Spies – the second to last novel to be published before his death in 2020, and his third to last novel after Silverview (2021) was released posthumously.

Connected to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), we return to characters we know – Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam – thrust into the glaring spotlight of modern scrutiny. While production is still in early phases, one star has reportedly been cast: Succession alum Matthew Macfadyen will take on the role of a young George Smiley, a character played by everyone from Gary Oldman to Simon Russell Beale, Rupert Davies to Denholm Elliott in Le Carré adaptations past.

Here’s everything we know so far about Legacy of Spies.

John Le Carré Legacy Of Spies TV Adaptation: Everything We Know So Far

Produced by two of Le Carré’s four sons – Stephen and Simon Cornwell – under their production company, The Ink Factory, Legacy of Spies is still in the early days. According to Variety, The Ink Factory has teamed up with Fifth Season to sell the series, with Graham Yost onboard as executive producer and Stephen Cornwell and Clarisa Ingram working on the initial scripts. There has reportedly been interest on both sides of the Atlantic, with multiple offers on the table, but nothing signed and secured just yet.

The Ink Factory is also behind the BBC’s 2018 adaptation of The Little Drummer Girl, starring Michael Shannon, Alexander Skarsgård and Florence Pugh, as well as the channel’s lauded adaption of The Night Manager – starring Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman, Tom Hollander and Elizabeth Debicki – which has two sequel seasons in the works. However, the brand also occasionally strays from its Le Carré roots: The Ink Factory is also behind Fighting With My Family (2019), Hotel Artemis (2018) and more.

Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Debicki in The Night Manager. (© AMC)

What Will Happen In Legacy Of Spies?

Legacy of Spies takes its title from one of Le Carré’s later novels (but drops the ‘A’), though we’re told the series won’t be a totally faithful adaption: it’ll draw on other works in prolific writer’s oeuvre, as well as some unpublished work. George Smiley is set to be at the centre, a quintessential Le Carré character who features in nine of his novels: as a protagonist in Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People and Karla’s Choice, and a supporting character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, The Secret Pilgrim and A Legacy of Spies.

The synopsis for A Legacy of Spies reads as follows:

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications.

Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own intense story, John Le Carré has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In a story resonating with tension, humor and moral ambivalence, Le Carré and his narrator Peter Guillam present the reader with a legacy of unforgettable characters old and new.

Matthew Macfadyen Is George Smiley

As far as casting goes, there’s one name at the top of the bill thus far: Matthew Macfadyen. While Macfadyen has enjoyed a pretty consistent career since the late ‘90s, he is best known for two very different roles: as tortured stoic upper class Brit Mr Darcy in 2005’s Pride & Prejudice, and as American class-climber Tom Wambsgans in HBO’s phenomenal hit, Succession. But Macfadyen is no stranger to a spy drama: he’s also known on British screens for his role as Tom Quinn in Spooks, while in 2021 he starred opposite Colin Firth in Operation Mincemeat. He’ll next be seen with Nicole Kidman in the weird mystery thriller, Holland.

George Smiley is one of Le Carré’s most famous characters, a purposeful antithesis to one of British fiction’s most famous spies, James Bond. Smiley is described as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’, a middle-aged, short and podgy man who hides ruthless cunning behind his ill-fitting clothes. (The challenge is on for Macfadyen, who towers at 6’2”.)

Intended as an ‘antidote’ to Bond, Smiley joins Le Carré’s unheroic British intelligence workforce, who engage in psychological rather than physical drama and are keenly aware of the moral ambiguity of their work during the Cold War.

Is It Based On A True Story?

The unique facet of Le Carré’s work is that it is all underpinned by the author’s very real experience working as a spy for British intelligence in the 1950s and ‘60s. Other than that, Legacy of Spies is entirely fictitious – or at least that’s what they’d have us think…