Guy Pearce is always great. But this real-life spy drama is his masterpiece

A Spy Among Friends ★★★★

Guy Pearce is a fine actor, as evidenced by a long and eclectic screen career. He handles all kinds of roles with ease, but there’s one type he particularly excels at: the privileged hypocrite. I’m thinking his waspish Duke of Windsor in The King’s Speech, or the entitled industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren from The Brutalist, a man who treated people like possessions. Pearce can deliver disdain and dismissiveness with a sharp edge, and given the slightest crack in a character’s façade he can reveal self-loathing and the rot of denial.

His masterpiece in this particular sub-genre was delivered in this 2022 British biographical espionage drama, available on free-to-air for the first time, where Pearce plays Kim Philby, a pillar of the British establishment who went from Cambridge University to MI6 while secretly working as a Soviet spy for more than 25 years. He’s an indiscreet drunk carrying impeccable establishment credentials – his father was the impossibly British author and explorer St John Philby – and a double agent whose belated exposure rocked Britain. It also destroyed his best friend and fellow MI6 officer, Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis).

Adapted by Alexander Cary (Homeland) from Ben Macintyre’s 2014 non-fiction book, A Spy Among Friends is barely concerned with discovery. It’s not about the panic of the mole hunt, but rather the torment of the revelation. He was publicly accused of spying for the Russians in as early as 1955, which resulted in Philby infamously denying the claims at a press conference (it’s recreated here). He was living in Beirut and still working for MI6 in 1963 when a devastated Elliott was sent to tell him the game was up. They met privately, and soon after Philby disappeared, reappearing in Moscow to a triumphal welcome.

Suitably labyrinthine and quietly gripping, the six episodes cut between several lengthy encounters that tell the story from different perspectives. There is the fraught confrontation between Philby and Elliott, a subsequent investigation of Elliott by MI5 agent Lily Thomas (Anna Maxwell-Martin), and a post-escape debriefing by a suspicious KGB colonel, Sergei Brontov (Karel Roden). The why and how are intertwined – events seen in flashback are interpreted differently by the various parties. The audience can hunt for clues, or take in the fetid atmosphere of mistrust and thwarted longing. Pain edges these faces which are trained to reveal nothing.

It is a spy story that sits alongside John le Carré’s best work; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s Bill Haydon was clearly modelled on Philby. The intimacy here is fierce, as justifications give way to painful admissions or rank hypocrisy. At one point Philby dismisses the “level of sentimentality and arrogance” of Britain’s then ruling class, even though he was a protected part of it since birth. Deployed by director Nick Murphy, the camera serves as a parallel interrogator, capturing a guilty flicker in close-up or a cityscape that speaks to the world the characters have become trapped in.

It is not clear whether Philby is tearing himself apart or living out a grand lark that will go down in history – Pearce can suggest both and whatever is needed to intertwine the contradictory impulses. For humour there is cruel self-deprecation and the lurking Americans, with paranoid CIA spycatcher James Jesus Angleton (Stephen Kunken) trying to pierce both his British and Russian counterparts. But what lingers, more than anything, is heartbreak. These are betrayals, public and private, that never wane.

A Spy Among Friends premieres on February 19 on SBS On Demand. The show is also available on Britbox.

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