Eyes on Iris
The Iris Affair creator Neil Cross reflects on making this topical eight-part Sky thriller set across Italy, how he was inspired by the glamorous TV he grew up with and why he embraces the “chaos” in his career as a writer.
As the creator of dark crime drama Luther, writer Neil Cross has spent more time than most on film sets in East London in the middle of the night.
So it’s noticeable that his latest series, The Iris Affair, was shot on location across Italy, from the stunning villas and piazzas of Rome and Florence to the picturesque beaches, country roads and cottages of Cagliari and Alghero on the island of Sardinia.
As an executive producer on the eight-part series, “I just felt it very necessary to spend as much time as possible [on set],” Cross laughs. “That was my sacrifice last year. What can I say? That’s my dedication to my art.”
In fact, he admits the idea of filming in Italy was a “large part” of the inspiration behind creating the cat-and-mouse thriller, proving that “it wasn’t entirely necessary for me to be in Shoreditch at 3am in February [for Luther] in order to make good telly. The idea of shooting somewhere nice, it was not a small part of the endeavour.”
Now airing on Sky Atlantic, The Iris Affair stars Niamh Algar (Malpractice) as enigmatic genius Iris Nixon, who cracks a string of puzzles to find her prize is a meeting with charismatic entrepreneur Cameron Beck (The Night Manager’s Tom Hollander). He invites her to work for him and unlock a powerful and top-secret piece of technology – a supercomputer named Charlie Big Potatoes that was shut down by its creator Jensen Lind (Kristofer Hivju) when he realised its power to change the world meant it was also more dangerous than he could have imagined.
Iris accepts the job but when she discovers its dangerous potential for herself, she steals the journal containing the device’s activation sequence and disappears. The series then follows Cameron’s relentless pursuit of Iris, who adopts numerous false identities – from Joy Baxter (Meréana Tomlinson)’s tutor Miss Brook to the lover of local cop Teo – to avoid being found.
Produced by Sky Studios and Fremantle, the series emerged from Cross’s desire to make a TV show he would want to watch – and one very much in the same vein as a lot of the classic TV he loves from the 1960s and 1970s.
“In the 70s particularly, there was a certain confidence [in TV] in that you could have worlds that were just a notch or two more glamorous than reality, but at the same time, a lot of television in the 70s and through the 80s was able to deal with some quite big, singular ideas,” he says. “The Avengers in the 60s, that kind of show I always found immensely satisfying, and there was a dearth of that kind of entertainment [today]. So I made some. That was the plan.”
Beneath the glamourous costumes and exotic locations, there are some big ideas at play in The Iris Affair, about the power of artificial intelligence and the encroaching use of technology, though the show would never be described as a science-fiction series.
That the show does deal with issues of AI “is not quite a coincidence,” Cross says, but he explains he wasn’t interested in portraying a “realistic” portrayal of today’s tech landscape. Instead, Charlie Big Potatoes is the show’s MacGuffin, the term popularised by Alfred Hitchcock to describe an object that drives the story forward.
Trying to portray technology realistically in TV would leave writers “on a hiding to nothing” as the real world moves much quicker than a television production. “But I am interested in how we react to world-changing technologies,” Cross says about the bigger themes of the show. “The nature of world-changing technology need not be something apocalyptic.
“Quite a lot in my lonely, sleepless hours about that poor guy who invented the ‘Like’ button, which is one of the world’s simplest inventions. He literally thought that he’d found a simple mechanism by which he could only improve the base level of human happiness – and the Like button has caused more misery, more anxiety, more self-hatred and more loneliness than something that might have been invented with the specific intention of causing those attributes.”
He also compares the reaction to AI to that of the printing press in the 15th century, noting how the initial impact of new technology can have “catastrophic consequences” in the short term but ultimately serve to enrich society and become “an unalloyed benefit to the human race.”
As a creative himself, Cross says he can understand the temptation of using AI in his own work, at a time when the global television industry is grappling with the potential impact of chatbots, AI ‘actresses’ and other yet-unforeseen consequences of new technology.
“I’m not saying I wouldn’t, if it were trustworthy at some point,” he says. “I use it as a ‘super Google search,’ and I use it in a way that my children would think was vaguely crusty and comical. Even if I look for a fact, I have to double check the fact because I don’t trust it, but there is a sense of something under the surface of reality is germinating, bubbling up in a way that I find interesting, sinister, terrifying and exhilarating.”
Building on the influence of shows such as The Persuaders and series produced by Lew Grade (The Saint, The Prisoner), Cross was also inspired by Patricia Highsmith and her novel The Talented Mr Ripley in the creation of Iris, an anti-hero in the vein of the author’s Tom Ripley.
“Even when I was a kid, if you preferred Luke Skywalker to Han Solo I thought you were mad,” Cross jokes. “And there aren’t many women anti-heroes on screen. It’s not something we’ve seen a great deal of.
“I like dramas in which clever people do dastardly things for different reasons. The character arose first, so I had to create a world that she could stand in opposition to.”
The series begins with a gun-toting stand-off between Iris and Cameron, before the action rewinds after a James Bond-esque opening title sequence to pick up the story one day earlier. The tale then goes back further in time to reveal how Iris and Cameron first met, and the proposition that led Iris to go on the run.
“Oh, it was a head fuck,” Cross says of introducing multiple timelines in just the first half of the opening episode. “As I started out, it wasn’t the intent to do that, but I was slightly again inspired by 70s shows or films that would have sliding boxes, and you’d be at a different timeline. I thought, ‘Let’s do some of that,’ but it’s actually very difficult. Narratively it’s not an easy thing to do, and it took some work in post-production to make sure that we had maintained enough narrative clarity that everybody knew when we were and what we were doing at any given point in the story.”
Cross describes himself as a “very instinctive, unplanned and unstructured writer” who didn’t know the ending to the show as he first started writing the scripts. But there’s something he enjoys about that approach to writing, where he always has the ability to surprise himself and the audience by taking the story in unexpected directions.
“I greatly admire Vince Gilligan, because I’d be insane if I didn’t, the creator of the greatest television show in history,” he says of the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul showrunner. “But his process in his writers’ room, I believe, was to start at scene one, episode one and they’d work through every scene in sequential order until they had the final scene of the final episode planned before they began writing. That method for a genius like Vince Gilligan clearly pays dividends, but I couldn’t do it. I’d be driven mad by boredom and claustrophobia. In no aspect of my life am I organised or structured. I like the chaos.”
Writing “clever” characters also forces him into situations where “you have to be clever to solve their problems,” he continues. “So you’re creating challenges for yourself. In a slightly puritanical sense, if you do write yourself into corners, the solution to the problem you create for yourself makes for better television because you’ve really had to think about it.”
Then once production begins, making a television show “is like trying to wrestle a cat. It’s a living beast,” Cross states. In fact, there were moments on the set of The Iris Affair where scenes written months earlier would be filmed side-by-side with those Cross penned the previous day.
“If I do have a skill, it’s writing to a particular performance of a character,” he says. “The actor inhabiting the character changes the nature of the character. Writing for Tom Hollander, for instance, he brought to the character levels of nuance, sensitivity, tenderness, anxiety and humanity that weren’t written into that version of the character. Tom brought the character to life, and because Tom brought the character to life, I was able to fall in love with the character.
“He was conceived originally as a complex ideas-driven bad guy who’d made some bad decisions and was in a difficult position that he was trying to get out of. But Tom humanised him to the extent that I was aware that I was no longer writing a bad guy. I was writing one of the other main characters of the show. I could never have anticipated that.”
Cross also enjoyed a “singular” relationship with Algar, having predicted that no actor could live up to his imagined vision of Iris. “I thought it was going to be like the search for Scarlett O’Hara,” he says, referencing the drawn-out hunt for an actress to take up the iconic role in 1939 feature Gone with the Wind. Vivien Leigh would go on to win the Academy Award for best actress for her performance.
But after a “slightly tortured” conversation with the show’s casting director, Gary Davy, where Cross expressed his worry at finding the right actor, Davy said: “‘Oh, you want to see Niamh Algar,’” Cross remembers. “Niamh taped for us the next day, and we never looked at or considered another actor. As soon as we saw her, all of us just went, ‘There she is.’
“She understood the character at some kind of genetic level. She would come to set in the morning just absolutely knowing exactly what she was going to do and how.”
The link between Highsmith’s Ripley and The Iris Affair continued in the shape of series producer Tim Bricknell, who counts 1999 feature adaptation The Talented Mr Ripley – which was also shot in Italy – among his first screen jobs. That meant he “completely understood” the kind of look Cross desired for The Iris Affair, from the blue skies to the cars and the clothes.
“I am fascinated by Ripley, and I’m fascinated by Hitchcock at his most glamorous, and how bright blue skies allow characters to do morally reprehensible things that, were they shot in Chicago in February, would have a very different complexion,” Cross notes. “Tim knew that I was very keen on finding the most glamorous places possible. In fact, I had one slug line when I didn’t want to be too specific, and I just said, ‘Somewhere spectacular.’ That caused more grief, because the conversation became, ‘Is it spectacular enough? Do you think this is spectacular?’”
Cross praises the show’s “extraordinary” crew who all had a hand in creating the “magic” bond enjoyed on set – something amplified by the fact many stayed together in the same “Overlook Hotel” location for several weeks, “eating together, working together, drinking together.”
“There’s something both efficient and joyous about that,” he says. “We worked long hours, but we worked long hours in beautiful places with great food.”
Cross draws a thematic line between Luther – the unconventional but brilliant detective brought to life by Idris Elba – and his other series, including Hard Sun, The Sister and The Mosquito Coast, as they all consider moral action in the world. The Iris Affair now takes that idea further.
“I’m very interested in criminal behaviour and there is a lens through which The Iris Affair is a crime show, because Iris is an anti-hero who’s broken the law. People die in the show as a result of what she does,” he says. “Really, the tension and the interaction between morality and crime, and what justifies violent or criminal action, is the thematic bucket to which I’m chained.”
Luther, and his emblematic long coats, were last seen in Netflix’s 2023 feature film Luther: The Fallen Sun, following five seasons of a show that aired on the BBC between 2010 and 2019. As for what he’s working on next, Cross teases: “You haven’t seen the last of the man in the coat, I suspect.”
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tagged in: Fremantle, Italy, Kristofer Hivju, Luther, Meréana Tomlinson, Neil Cross, Niamh Algar, Sky Atlantic, The Iris Affair, Tom Hollander