BBC Two and Sundance Channel have locked down the core cast for their upcoming co-production The Honourable Woman. Janet McTeer, Stephen Rea, Lindsay Duncan, Andrew Buchan, Katherine Parkinson, Lubna Azbal, Tobias Menzies, Genevieve O’Reilly, Igal Naor and Eve Best have joined the cast of the espionage mini. The join previously announced main cast member Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is playing series lead Nessa Stein.
McTeer has been cast as Julia Walsh, the Chief of MI6; Rea as Hugh Hayden-Hoyle, a top MI6 spy on the verge of retirement who is digging deep into Nessa Stein’s family; Duncan as Anjelica, Hugh Hayden-Hoyle’s bitter ex wife; Buchan as Ephra Stein, Nessa’s brother who is seemingly over-shadowed by his sister within the Stein family business; Parkinson as Rachel Stein, Ephra’s highly strung pregnant wife; Azbal as Atika Halibi, nanny to Ephra and Rachel Stein’s two young daughters and a close friend to Nessa; Menzies as Nathaniel Bloom, Nessa’s trusted personal body guard; Naor as Shlomo Zahary, a close long-time ally of the Stein family; and Best as Monica Chatwin, an MI6 agent from the agency’s Washington Bureau who is spoiling for a fight with her UK counterparts.
In addition to those mentioned above, other actors joining the cast of The Honourable Woman (which now stands at nearly 100) includes Martin Hutson, Nicholas Woodeson, Raad Rawi, Richard Katz, Philip Arditti, John Mackay, Rupert Frazer, Uriel Emil, Paul Herzberg, George Georgiou, Julia Montgomery-Brown, Martin Mcdougall, Aiden Stephenson, Tom Bateman, Amira Ghazalla, Hugh Ross and Stephen Boxer. Production is set to commence this week in London. The shoot is expected to take three months.
Penned by Hugo Blick, The Honourable Woman follows Nessa Stein (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who, as a child witnessed the assassination of her father who was a Zionist arms procurer. As an adult, inheriting her father’s company, she dramatically inverts its purpose from supplying arms to laying high-spec data cabling networks between Israel and the West Bank. Now in her thirties, her sudden appointment as a life peer, apparently due to her tireless promotion of projects for reconciliation between the Israelis and Palestinians, creates an international political maelstrom. Following the murder of a Palestinian business man, Samir Meshal, after he had just been awarded the latest cabling contract, Nessa and her brother Ephra find themselves placed under the scrutiny of both Whitehall and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). The drama series is being produced by Eight Rooks and Drama Republic in association with Sundance Channel. The executive producers are Polly Hill, Hugo Blick and Greg Brenman.
