"Voluntarily putting a listening device in your house? The Stasi would kill for an Amazon Echo!” Emma Moran is marvelling at the unexpected timeliness of her new BBC series, following a deep-cover spy in 1980s’ East Berlin. “When I was writing , there was a lot going on in
the world about humanity breaking through totalitarianism, people enduring and finding community as superpowers clashed. That hasn’t gone away, unfortunately.”
stars Ann Skelly as Martha Schmitt, the alias of Carolyn Martens who, viewers may recall, was played by Fiona Shaw in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s smash hit espionage thriller (oddly, Skelly bears a spooky resemblance to both Shaw and Jodie Comer, that show’s breakout star). By then, she was head of MI6’s Russia Desk. In Moran’s of the early 1980s, however, she is a rookie agent run by her “warm, fatherly” handler (Rory Kinnear) and soon caught between “loveably misogynist” CIA agent Aaron Neeland, aka Kurt Fischer (Nate Mann) and “nerdy, smoulderingly intense” Stasi counterespionage head Friedrich Bauman (Jannis Niewöhner).
The new time and place ensures parent show doesn’t cast too long a shadow. “I wanted the tone to be like sisters, as opposed to making part two,” Moran says. “I genuinely forgot about that show at points, because the goal was just to make something good that stands on its own, without trampling on the source material.”
While the Russian invasion of Ukraine put paid to the original concept of Carolyn in Moscow, East Berlin (represented here by the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius) still offered “a rich playground” for Moran to inject some humanity, fun and romance into a setting seldom associated with any of those things – although she was alert to not trivialising a traumatic period for those who lived through it, drawing inspiration from the tragedy of The Lives of Others and the comedy of .
“We really wanted to humanise the so-called bad guys,” she says. “Friedrich, for example, is a nuanced character with wants and desires like anyone else. I tried to look at the Stasi as not this grey monolith, but more like the Microsoft of East Germany with annoying bureaucracy, inept co-workers, impenetrable hierarchies, office clowns…”
Moran grew up in rural Northern Ireland, “seeing the world through television” and her dad’s favourite comedies – , , – alongside a few American genre classics, including and – “I could recite the first 10 series to you, word for word.”
While studying at UCL, she started performing sketches and stand-up (“a safe space to be unbelievably bad”) in person and online, before chafing at the restrictions of social media’s 90-second format. A masters in screenwriting was hijacked when, while part of the BBC’s Comedy Room initiative, she won a screenwriting competition for unrepresented female writers, run by and producers Sid Gentle Films.
“That was ,” she says, referencing her 2023 superhero sitcom. “I don’t think they expected it to get commissioned, they were more throwing me a bone, but I just got lucky with the timing because Disney+ was launching and wanted something young and quirky.”
Despite four Bafta nominations and warm reviews, only lasted two seasons; Moran’s disappointment, though, was eased by the entirely new challenge of , where “the plotting has to be intricate and there have to be stakes, while keeping the humour and levity”.
I wanted the show to be like sisters, not Killing Eve part two
Waller-Bridge and Emerald Fennell (showrunner for series two) were in the vanguard of young women creatives blazing a trail, and Moran is grateful. “I’m glad I didn’t have to be at the absolute forefront of it and feel like I was representing ‘all women’, which feels like a massive, unfair burden. I’ve also been lucky to work with really female-dominated teams – although we do let men come in now and again! – so I find it quite natural.”
While she didn’t speak to any spies (“that I know of”), Moran worked with former BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera (see right) to ground even the most outré of Cold War spycraft – a dog costume, a prosthetic scrotum – in some sort of reality. And while she was only born in 1993, Moran was keen to embrace the 1980s without fetishising them.
“We wanted to keep colour and largesse in make-up and hair, grounded in actual 1980s East Berlin as opposed to what the 80s looked like in the West. Our production designer, Erwin Prib, lived there at the time and was incredibly helpful. I’d written a scene where Kurt throws a rotten banana at Martha, and Erwin pointed out they didn’t have bananas in East Berlin back then. I also accidentally used a Germanic slur in reference to a dog. Basically, he stopped me from causing a diplomatic incident.”
With ideas percolating for a second series of and filming on her Netflix adaptation of Bella Mackie’s thriller How to Kill Your Family underway, those early days in stand-up seem a long way away. “Oh, yeah. Stand-up is great when it’s great. When it’s bad, it’s the worst thing a human being could ever experience. I’m very happy with where I am right now.”
'You can't box in love'
Though set in the 80s, chimes with today’s mores, says Ann Skelly
Ann Skelly, who plays lead, Martha Schmitt (aka Carolyn Martens), reckons she would be a great spy – “I’d be dead in 10 years, but what a 10 years!” – and the professions of actor and deep-cover agent do have things in common, the 29-year-old House of Guinness star concedes.
“You have to construct circumstances and character traits and relationships,” she explains. “Inhabit different identities while being tuned into something empathetic and real – although Martha tends to use that empathy against people. You think you’re invulnerable, you can’t wait to show how exceptional you are, then the world bashes you around a bit. But Martha backs herself all the way, which I love. You have to believe in yourself, or no one else will.”
Self-belief has been essential for Skelly, who grew up in rural Ireland. Her first memory of acting was, she recalls, hitting boys in the playground while desperately wanting to be an orphan after watching . “I loved making people laugh and being the weird kid – it was about wanting to enter another world.”
After her mother enrolled her on acting courses in Dublin, she was recalled to audition – ultimately unsuccessfully – for indie charmer , before being picked by the same casting director for a key part in Irish police drama in 2015. Three years later, Skelly would be holding her own with Matthew Rhys and Jamie Dornan as the lead of the BBC’s period drama, Death and Nightingales.
“I can’t get over how competent and confident I felt at the time,” she marvels. “Now it’s way more terrifying to lead a show, maybe because I know my limits!”
Having honed her comedic chops in HBO’s superpowered steampunk drama , Skelly was instantly attracted to dark humour, energy and tension, as well as a “frustrating” relevance.
“The Stasi intercepted people’s friendship groups and families, separating people and making them distrust each other. It’s strange seeing all the online discourse about how separated everyone is now. But the great thing about is that it also talks about the uncontrollable nature of love, want and desire. You can’t box them in. That’s gorgeous, much needed and a good anchor – it’s helped me through a lot of the politics going on now.”
'It feels like the Cold War'
Formerly the BBC’s security correspondent and now co-host of the hit podcast , Gordon Corera was also a consultant on and is now the same on – not that he wants to take too much credit.
“The role can be about the big, conceptual stuff and the really small details. Given East Germany was saturated with informers and agents, there was plenty to go at for , but you’re not a factchecker trying to make life difficult and go, ‘That wouldn’t happen’. It’s more about supplying a degree of credibility, giving the writer different ways of, say, showing a mole hunt, then letting them work their magic – and the magic of these shows is in their verve and distinctive character. That has very little to do with me.”
Now 52, Corera was tapped up for his three decades of expertise on everything from Stasi interrogation techniques – “How rough did they get? How much was psychological?” – to the insertion of an agent into deep cover. “The Brits didn’t do a lot of that during the Cold War and didn’t really use spies as honey traps, so it was more about taking the knowledge of what the Russians did – and still do – and making it work for the story.”
Even the prosthetic testicles that feature in the series were rooted in reality. “The CIA developed them during the Cold War to conceal miniature radios inside and give them to pilots. The theory was, if you were captured, the enemy would be nervous of giving them too much of a squeeze. It’s not clear whether they actually deployed them...”
With hi-tech surveillance and great power blocs again in the geopolitical ether, he says, the old ways are as important as ever. “Work from MI5 to counter state threats from foreign adversaries – spy catching, sabotage and so on – has quadrupled in the last decade, so it feels more like the Cold War than it has for a long time.”
As a self-confessed devourer of both spy fact and fiction, Corera is tickled by the feedback loop between the two. “In the Cold War, the CIA director would watch James Bond then say to his technology directorate, ‘Can we do that?’ In my dream world, someone at MI6 will watch and go, ‘Could we use a dog costume?’”