One of the first rules Neil Cross gave his team when making Iris, the new thriller series he created for Sky U.K., was that the lead character should never drive a car with a roof. “If Grace Kelly wouldn’t drive it, neither should Iris,” says Cross, laughing.
After spending years in the grime of East London making Luther, the dark cop drama starring Idris Elba as a homicide detective with some very nasty personal demons, Cross was ready for something light and sunny. With Iris, which “to create a different kind of show… something my wife and I could enjoy with a glass of wine on the sofa.”
Iris exchanges Luther‘s cold and cloudy London for a sun-drenched Italian countryside — the show was shot largely in Sardina — and takes inspiration from the British spy and adventure shows of Cross’ youth, think The Saint or The Persuaders!, for its chase thriller plot line.
Irish actress Niamh Algar (Raised By Wolves) stars as the titular Iris Nixon, an enigmatic genius and obsessive puzzler who is recruited by the charming philanthropist Cameron McIntyre (Tom Hollander) to break a code that will unlock a dangerously powerful, world-changing piece of technology. Suspicious of Cameron’s motives, Iris steals the code and goes on the run, setting off a cat-and-mouse chase with the clock ticking for Iris to figure out what the code could unleash before she is found.
Sky Studios and Fremantle co-produced Iris, with Wildside providing production services in Italy. Tim Bricknell produces the show, with Cross executive producing alongside Terry McDonough; Dante Di Loreto and Jenni Sherwood for Fremantle, and Adrian Sturges for Sky Studios. Sky will release Iris in the U.K. and in select European countries. Fremantle is repping international sales and presenting the show to buyers at the London TV Screenings this week.
Cross spoke to The Hollywood Reporter via Zoom from his home in New Zealand about exchanging East London grime for Italian sunshine, his love of light, entertaining television, and the challenge of writing his first female lead character. “I stripped her of all my weaknesses [my] anxieties, self-doubt, the desire to please.”
So, you’re in New Zealand now, right?
Yes, I’ve got a secret lair under a volcano here.
Good to see there are still people keeping up the 1960s James Bond villain aesthetic.
I have my minions in orange jumpsuits; it all works very well.
Speaking of style, this will be my awkward transition to your new show. It seems like a bit of a change of pace for you in terms of both style and the main character. Where did the original idea come from?
As is always the case, it was a series of ideas that gradually surrounded me. Some were practical. For instance, I realized that to do my job, it wasn’t absolutely necessary to be in East London at 3:00 AM in February. I worked in Mexico for a bit and had a wonderful time there. So that selfish but hopefully forgivable urge to have a nice time working really unlocked the floodgates for the idea behind Iris.
I also grew up watching a lot of old television, and I still do. Right now, I’ve just discovered Orson Welles Great Mysteries on YouTube. It’s terrible in a fantastic way. That made me wonder if it was possible to create a different kind of show, one that I’d love to watch—something my wife and I could enjoy with a glass of wine on the sofa.
Iris definitely doesn’t seem as dark or intense as Luther.
Absolutely. Of course, what could be? Creatively, I found it more challenging and more fun to make something cinematic and beautiful with bright, blue skies. One of my early editorial dictates was that Iris should never drive a car with a roof. If Grace Kelly wouldn’t drive it, neither should Iris. We didn’t fully stick to that, but we did end up with Ferraris and all kinds of supercars.
And the puzzle aspect of the show — where did that come from? Are you a puzzle freak yourself?
God, no! I have neither the patience nor the aptitude for puzzle-solving. I get grumpy very quickly. My wife and younger son, however, are inveterate puzzle solvers. What intrigued me was a real-life internet puzzle called Cicada 3301, which ran from 2009 to 2012. It attracted geniuses from all over the world, yet we still don’t know who created it or why. We don’t know if it was a recruitment aid. We don’t know if it’s a practical joke. We don’t know if it was security services.
That mystery fascinated me. The question of who solves puzzles like that, and who sets puzzles like that was interesting to me. But I didn’t want to make the setter of this puzzle some international, mega, global corporation, or the CIA or the FSB, or, God help them, MI:6 tripping over their shoelaces. I wanted to personalize it and have this puzzle set by somebody who needed help. And this is a recruitment drive to find somebody of exceptional ability. As Cameron describes Iris: She’s an she’s an outliers’ outlier. He’s got a really big puzzle that he needs to solve for very personal reasons.
Iris is a very different protagonist from Luther, and while you’ve written strong female characters before, this is your first time with a female lead. How did you go about writing from that perspective?
I stripped her of all my weaknesses — anxieties, self-doubt, the desire to please. She doesn’t have the same social concerns most of us do. She isn’t easily categorized. She’s not simply “on the spectrum” or some kind of trope. She’s an outlier’s outlier. She has an insane IQ but, as she herself points out, IQ is baloney, it just measures how good you are at IQ tests. She’s got no financial ambition and she gets bored very easily. She’s never been interested in a career, because her nature is such that the boredom of a job would kill her.
And what did Niamh Algar and Tom Hollander bring to their roles?
Niamh’s casting was alchemical. I spoke to our casting director — and Sky, the network, were very indulgent of me in this respect — and I said: “I want to find an actor who was well known but not yet universally known, someone who was on the cusp of being really big and really great.” Niamh read the script, auditioned, and immediately brought an unexpected depth to Iris. She was spiky, guarded, and carried hidden aggression. If cast incorrectly, Iris could have come off as a cliché, but Niamh made her unpredictable and deeply human.
One of the main conflicts in the show, and again, I don’t like using this jargon so much, but one of the main conflicts in show is between Tom’s character and Neil’s character. They have a relationship that is is primarily intellectual. They really like to spark off each other, jousting verbally in a kind of old screwball comedy way. We’d be talking about various scenes and we’d say: “Can we Billy Wilder this up a bit?”
You’ve mentioned Billy Wilder, Orson Welles Great Mysteries. Were there any other touchstones for you in terms of the mood or atmosphere you’re trying to capture with Iris?
There was a great British television producer called Lew Grade who produced a whole bunch of these Technicolor adventures, spy-ish shows in the 60s and 70s, like The Prisoner and The Persuaders! with Tony Curtis and Roger Moore. I was very inspired by that stuff, but also by a certain strain of cosmic horror, of science fiction.
Again, I don’t want to lean into this too heavily because it doesn’t define the show, but my favorite television writer of all time was a guy called Nigel Kneale who did a show called Quatermass in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s in Britain. And they were utterly terrifying, the scariest thing you’ve ever seen on television. I’m still very inspired by Nigel. The police station in Luther is called Hot Slane, which is named after a fictional tube station in one of Nigel Kneale’s shows.
Luther, like Breaking Bad and other shows of that era, was very dark and plumbed the depths of human depravity. Do you see a desire now, in yourself, but maybe also among audiences, to have things be a bit lighter, a bit brighter, not have the horribleness of humanity pounded into you with every episode?
Absolutely. Television’s primary function is to entertain. It can educate peripherally, but if you want deep, polyphonic approach to the human experience, and if you want the deployment of dramatic irony, read a novel. Novels are amazing. They’re fantastic. If you want to sit down and have fun, watch TV. That doesn’t mean it’s stupid. I’ll be very dull and predictable and quote The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Shield — which is much forgotten, but really did plumb the depths of human depravity but was still entertaining. Entertainment doesn’t mean frivolity, but it’s okay to watch TV and have fun. It’s okay, and it can still be clever, it can still be invigorating. It can still present you with ideas that you’ve never put together before. It can still surprise you, frighten you, scare you, and have you on the edge of your seat.
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