Whether it's Sean Connery, Roger Moore or others portraying James Bond, or Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in the "Mission: Impossible" film series, we find ourselves sucked into the world of espionage thanks to the spy genre of television shows and movies.
In this week's episode of Streamed & Screened, hosts Bruce Miller and Terry Lipshetz have a brief discussion of the genre to set up a conversation with Guy Pearce, the star of "Spy Among Friends," a limited series available now on MGM+.
Read more: Guy Pearce, Damian Lewis ponder betrayal with 'Spy Among Friends'
About the show
Streamed & Screened is a podcast about movies and TV hosted by Bruce Miller, a longtime entertainment reporter who is now the editor of the Sioux City Journal in Iowa and Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises based in Madison, Wisconsin.
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was generated by Podium.page and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
0:00:03Welcome everyone to another episode of streamed and screened in an entertainment podcast about movies and TV from Lee Enterprises. I'm Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer at Lee and cohost of the program with Bruce Miller, editor of the Sioux City Journal and a longtime entertainment reporter. Bruce, I I wanna pass you a note. I've got some secrets. Do you have any secrets? Can you share anything? Yeah. Send me a text. Okay? That might be the best.
0:00:28In the old days, you know, spies were so much different because they would sit on a park bench and they pass an envelope between each other. Right? Right? Now it's like we're hacking into systems and we're going to we always you notice how they always have that clock that counts down until the file is uploaded, and it's like, oh, is it gonna happen? Is it gonna happen? Well, there, all you had to worry about was did somebody grab the envelope or are you just letting it go? So it is a different world.
0:00:57And there's a new mini series or limited series, whatever you wanna call it, that has been airing in Great Britain already, and it got huge reviews. They loved it over there. It's called a spy among friends. And we're getting it now on MGM Plus. And it is the the sort of true story of Kim Philby. You probably have never heard of Kim Philby at all. But he was a traitor to Great Britain. He was a spy, but he was getting information from Russia. And when they found out that he was defecting to Russia, they sent his friend to try and talk to him about all of this. And, like, would you keep this information? I don't know how I could ever be a spy because I talk too much. And I think I I would tell too much. But that your your best friend could not guess that you were gonna be a traitor. And, you know, wouldn't you have dropped some kind of message about this? I find that just really hard to believe. Yeah. But but yeah. And that was a big scandal in the sixties. And people remember the name Kim Philby because he was this trader who went to Russia. And he was very well known. Today, it doesn't graze the radar. People really don't know who he is, or who his friends were.
0:02:17But the film, which kind of looks at the class system that's very popular in Great Britain, tries to explain all of that by that because there was a group of young man who thought that they were if you will, better than other people because they went to the right schools, they had the right majors, they had the right connections, their parents were probably somebody. And as Damian Lewis says, they dabbled in communism. And so they thought that this was kind of a cool thing that we could do, and they wouldn't be caught for anything like this. Well, Kim Philby, didn't just dabble. He was doing a little bit more with all of that. And I got a chance to talk to Guy Pierce who plays Kim and he was talking about acting acting and acting as a spy. How much acting is involved with all of that? Do you really Do you feel you need to