Gay spies are people, too, after all.http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/01/london-spy-bbc-america-ben-whishawPREMIERES JANUARY 21, 2016 12:58 PMLondon Spy Is a Gay Twist on a Well-Worn GenreBY RICHARD LAWSON
Courtesy of BBCGay spies?? Yes, gay spies.In the new
BBC America mini-series
London Spy, premiering on January 21, two people leading very different lives—one a secretive, buttoned-up type, the other an aimless, hedonistic clubgoer—meet, fall in love, and then are thrown into a knotty intrigue after one of them disappears. As the series’s title would suggest, this is a spy story, and its early beats have the familiar rhythms of many a stately,
Graham Greene–ish mystery before it. Only, well, this time the two lovers torn apart by shadowy forces are both men, giving
London Spy a fascinating, decidedly modern extra dimension.
What’s satisfying, and commendable, about this series is that it doesn’t simply graft a gay romance onto a traditional spy story, but presents something whose gayness and spyness are wholly intertwined and inseparable—it’s a narrative for which the gay aspect is integral rather than incidental, which feels rare even in our progressive age of television. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the wounded club kid is played by everyone’s beloved British beanpole
Ben Whishaw, or that the strapping
Edward Holcroft plays his shifty new boyfriend. But the eye candy is beside the point. (Though, gird yourself for Episode 1’s sex scene—yowsers.) The point is that
London Spy, which was created by novelist
Tom Rob Smith, does not shy away from the particulars of gay male life—sexual mores, H.I.V. fears, various potently lingering prejudices—while also creating a compelling mystery suitable to more than a niche audience. (Indeed, when the series premiered in the U.K. late last year, it earned high ratings.)
I recently spoke with Smith on the phone, curious to hear his take on the gayness and the spyness of it all, and he explained to me why the series’s love affair, between Whishaw’s
Danny and Holfcroft’s
Alex, had to be built the way that it is. “Clearly the gay thing is central to the story. Not because of any particular agenda that I had, but because I thought the most interesting version of this story is to have a gay couple. Because it’s about someone’s love story being attacked by stereotypes. And I can’t see how that would work with a straight couple, in a straightforward sense.”
As Smith sees it,
London Spy’s twisty secret-agent intrigue, particularly involving
M.I.6, is a good metaphorical fit for the series’s social themes. “If I was being neat, that’s a way of talking about the show itself: you flip [the M.I.6] building around, on the rear of it, it’s not as iconic, but you have this high wall with security cameras and then directly opposite you have these [
Vauxhall] clubs that open at 10 and close at 10. It’s interesting that all the people going into this world, into this very discreet door, are in a sense oblivious of the world opposite them.” But at a time when at least parts of the world have made great strides in advancing gay rights, is homosexuality still something that can be wrapped in that particular metaphorical cloak, something clandestine and secretive, and possibly troubled?
“I have friends whose daughter was struggling with being gay,” Smith told me. “And they’re the most wonderful parents, and they’re living in London, which is now a very tolerant and welcoming city. And they’re struggling to understand why she might be struggling with it. I just said to them, ‘There’s a big difference between a theoretical position of equality and coming to terms with it on a personal level, working out the difficulties and trying to overcome it.’”
In
London Spy we see the different sides of that continuing struggle played out not just by closeted Alex and the more free-wheeling Danny, but by Danny’s friend and perhaps lovelorn mentor,
Scottie, an aging spook who experienced an altogether more repressive kind of discrimination in his would-be salad days. (Scottie is played—note-perfectly, with a sad sort of wisdom—by
Jim Broadbent.) Through its tale of murder, cover-up, and cruelly exploited stigma,
London Spy avoids any heavy, obvious messaging, while still remaining unflinching in its queerness. Which, in turn, becomes its own kind of message: yes, gay stories can be vital, and accessible, because they are gay stories, and that’s something we should be O.K. with admitting, and, as the BBC has done, comfortable sharing with a larger audience.
As a mystery-thriller,
London Spy might take a few too many contemplative pauses or moody digressions to satisfy viewers simply looking for a by-the-book spy caper, but even as the series veers from internal angst to a modest bit of camp—mostly involving
Charlotte Rampling’s wonderfully frigid and withholding lady of a faded house—it maintains its urgency, its value as something odd and alluring and, in its somber way, hopeful about how representation in media might look in the future.
The U.K. and the United States are different countries, of course, but if Britain’s response to
London Spy has been any indication, we have reason to hope that the needle on what American audiences will accept from television that features overt, fundamental gay themes could move, or already has moved, to accommodate this series. “We had some articles saying there were all these calls to
Ofcom, which is [Britain’s television] regulator, about the sex scene in Episode 1,” Smith explained. “That ran as a big story, and then it turned out there was one complaint to Ofcom. Literally just a single person complained to Ofcom about the scene. So there was a slight discrepancy between the coverage, which implied there was this mass outrage, and the reality, which is that there wasn’t any outrage.”
If there is any genuine outrage to be had, it might be about where the series takes Danny as he is plunged into a web of deceit and coldhearted machinations he’s not well equipped to navigate. By the end of
London Spy, some viewers will likely have strong opinions about how the series handles the issue of H.I.V., and how it handles its many red herrings. Though they might gripe about the wild places the series ultimately goes (the implications of its central mystery turn out to be rather grand), hopefully they can still appreciate how the series maintains its admirable sense of conviction—to its strangeness, to its romantic and social inquiry—throughout.
London Spy is sad and grim and messy. But there is a crucial bit of real humanity reflected in all that, which makes
London Spy as worth watching as any more “traditional” mystery series, for any kind of viewer. Gay spies are people, too, after all.
