America Ferrera (Barbie), Paddy Considine (House of the Dragon), Kit Harington (Game of Thrones) and Alex Hassell (Rivals) are among the star-studded cast for a new Channel 4 thriller called Army of Shadows.
Co-produced by StudioCanal and Two Cities Television, the series is penned by BAFTA-winning Ronan Bennett (The Day of the Jackal, MobLand) and has begun filming across Manchester, Liverpool, London and Paris.
The show is inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 film and Joseph Kessel’s seminal book of the same name, which famously dramatized the emergence of the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France during World War II.
Army of Shadows imagines how a resistance would have taken shape in an occupied Great Britain. The series has been developed and produced with the support of the Melville family and the Kessel estate, controlled by the Irish Red Cross.
“Britain looks almost normal, but the flags are different, the news is careful, and nobody says certain things out loud anymore. But everyone can feel it,” reads a plot synopsis. “Somewhere beneath the surface of ordinary life, something has gone terribly, quietly wrong. Out of the shadows emerges a former soldier known only as Berry, who starts building a secret resistance network. He knows one thing above all else: don’t act before you’re ready. An unlikely group starts to coalesce around him — people who’ve decided they can’t look away any longer: a soldier, a student, a radiographer, a journalist. Ordinary people, with ordinary lives, making an extraordinary and irreversible choice.”
Against them is a state with unlimited reach, a minister who’ll do whatever it takes to maintain order, and an American operative called Jessie (Ferrera), who is “very, very, good at her job.” Army of Shadows pegged as a “tense, propulsive thriller about what resistance actually costs… If your country were occupied, what wouldyou do?”
Gwawr Lloyd, interim head of drama at Channel 4, said Bennett has created a “gripping, provocative and action-packed drama that feels both epic in scale and strikingly relevant.” He continued: “Army of Shadows asks powerful questions about freedom, resistance and the choices people make when democracy is under threat. With a stellar cast lined up under the direction of Lisa Gunning, this is exactly the kind of thought-provoking and high-stakes drama that Channel 4 looks to bring to our viewers.”
Canal+ has commissioned the series for its global footprint spanning over 50 countries across France, Europe, Africa and Asia. StudioCanal will handle international sales and worldwide distribution.