Susan Sarandon & Olivia Colman Join Ronan Bennett’s Starry Thriller Series ‘Army Of Shadows’, Filming Underway

EXCLUSIVE: A very good-looking project has just become more so. Oscar winners Susan Sarandon and Olivia Colman have joined Paddy Considine, America Ferrera, Alex Hassell and Kit Harington in thriller series Army Of Shadows, which is now filming in Paris and London.

This is the project set in a near-future authoritarian Britain from MobLand and The Day of the Jackal creator Ronan Bennett as well as Studiocanal, Two Cities Television and Channel4.

Leila Farzad, Luther Ford, Amara Okereke, Patrick O’Kane, Anjli Mohindra, Ed Ashley and Zoë Telford round out the ensemble cast.

Studiocanal is handling worldwide sales. Lisa Gunning (Black Doves) is directing all six episodes. Co-produced by Studiocanal and Two Cities Television (Patrick Melrose), the drama is written by BAFTA winner Bennett.

Inspired by Jean Pierre Melville’s 1969 film (from the Studiocanal catalogue) and Joseph Kessel’s seminal book of the same name, Army of Shadows, is developed and produced with the support of the Melville family, and the Kessel estate.

Melville’s film and Kessel’s source material book famously dramatised the emergence of the French Resistance to the Nazi Occupation of France during World War 2. The new project will show how resistance takes shape in an occupied Great Britain.

The synopsis reads: “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. 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: a state with unlimited reach, a ruthless minister who’ll do whatever it takes to maintain “order”, and an American intelligence operative called Jessie, who is very, very good at her job. Army of Shadows is a tense, propulsive thriller about what resistance actually costs. If your country were occupied, what would you do?”

The project was commissioned for the UK by Channel 4 by Gwawr Lloyd, Interim Head of Drama for Channel 4 and Gemma Boswell and Rebecca Holdsworth, Drama Commissioning Editors, Channel 4. Executive producers are Paul Gilbert and M-K Kennedy for Stuiocanal Television; Ron Halpern and Joe Naftalin for Studiocanal, with Stephen Wright and Michael Jackson for Two Cities Television alongside Ronan Bennett.

Studiocanal developed the series from inception with Two Cities Television, which is part of STV Studios. Alison Sterling is the series producer. Canal+ will release the series in their territories in Europe, Africa and Asia.

The project is the first for Studiocanal’s recently launched in-house production arm. Royalties from Kessel’s works are bequeathed to the Irish Red Cross.

Sarandon is one of the greats of modern cinema but has spoken recently about being shunned by Hollywood for her political stances. This marks her highest profile project in recent years. Colman is another big beast of the screen over the last decade and has been three-times Oscar nominated in that time.

Sarandon is represented by United Agents, Atlas Artists and Do Mgmt in Italy. Colman is represented by United Agents and Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole.