Killer instincts
From developing a high-octane plot to leading their first writers room, Harry and Jack Williams share their experience of making The Assassin – and why they’re always up for a creative challenge.
In the opening stages of The Assassin, the sight of Keeley Hawes walking along the beach on an idyllic island might conjure memories of her genteel ITV family drama The Durrells.
Yet it soon becomes clear the only thing the two shows have in common is their Greek locations: Hawes’s character, Julie, stumbles hungover across the sand before a sweary altercation with a group of kids ends with her punting their football into the sea. Louisa Durrell, she is not.
The latest series from writer-producers Harry and Jack Williams (The Tourist, Boat Story), The Assassin finds retired hitwoman Julie living out an isolated, empty retirement on a small Greek island where she shares a difficult relationship with the locals. When her estranged son Edward (Freddie Highmore) arrives for a visit, she soon finds her past catching up with her, and the pair are forced to go on the run. With questions around Edward’s paternity and Julie’s past, they travel across Europe together in a fight for survival.
“The Tourist was more drama with a bit of comedy, more Coen brothers, and Boat Story was everything dialled up to Tarantino violence; extreme and stylistically mental,” Harry tells DQ. “This is somewhere in between. It’s lighter and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It lets the comedy be funny but it is just a character show about these two people. We’ve let ourselves off the hook, not trying to do too many things with this one, and just let it be fun, which is kind of a relief, because Boat Story was so fucking weird.”
“It was dark and weird and meta, and about stories and why we tell stories,” Jack says of Boat Story. “So we went, ‘You know what, let’s fucking enjoy it and find a show that’s hopefully joyous to watch, and you can just watch and enjoy and lose yourself in.’ That’s the goal.”
In fact, The Assassin – which debuts today on Prime Video in the UK and Ireland – was first developed before Boat Story, the BBC series that aired in 2023, meaning it has more in common tonally with Australia-set The Tourist, which debuted in 2022 and returned for a second season last year. Yet because of the cost of making the action-packed drama, which features motorbike stunts, car chases and a doomed wedding all in episode one, it was “parked” while Boat Story went into production.
“But coming off Boat Story to do this, it was quite refreshing because it was very different,” Jack says. “We thought, ‘Ah, let’s just have a breath of fresh air and have some fun.’”
Notably for the brothers – whose credits also include The Missing, Baptiste, Angela Black and Liar – The Assassin marks the first time they have opened a writers room for one of their original series. Krissie Ducker (Killing Eve, Sweetpea), Hamish Wright (Significant Other) and Selina Lim (Sex Education) also write on the show.
“It was a learning process for us, more than anyone else really, because we’ve got such a shorthand. We’ve done it for so long that storylining is just a lot quicker when we do it,” Harry says. However, as they were working across numerous projects both as writers and producers at their Two Brothers Pictures company, “we thought we should open it up. It was really good. It sometimes slowed things down, oddly. Well, for us – they were better at it than we were.”
“There was a controlled chaos to the whole thing. That was our doing,” jokes Jack. “We haven’t done it before and we have a way of working where if we think something is better, we will chuck everything out and start all over again and find a more exciting way of doing something. That can be very tiring, so they had to be quite patient with us, and we probably learned a lot about how to do it.”
Finding the right tone for what boils down to a relationship drama between Julie and Edward – plus numerous action set pieces and lots of jokes – proved the biggest challenge of the work in the writers room.
“The tone is very specific,” Jack notes. “If you go too run of the mill – not that anyone did – it could be a very generic action adventure, or it can get a little bit too silly. Some plot points, if you’re having too much fun with them, just become a bit disposable and feel a bit unbelievable.
“Treading that line was something we were doing ourselves. And when there are three other people all looking at you, going, ‘Well what it is?’ and we’re like, ‘Well, we don’t really know yet,’ quite often we’d write things and shoot them and then take them out in the edit because it felt like we’d pushed it too far. We are constantly changing and adjusting. They were great. We were the problem.”
He adds: “Coming off Boat Story, having written, produced and directed that, we were so fucking tired. The thought of doing anything filled us with horror, so it was really good to have three people who are enthusiastic and keen and thought writing was fun. That was great.”
The brothers admit that even the finished scripts might have seemed too silly in places, but they asked broadcasters and platforms including Prime Video (UK & Ireland), ZDF (Germany) and Stan (Australia) to hold their nerve, so sure were they that the cast would ground the story through their performances. If it still didn’t work, “we’d be the first ones to get rid of it,” Jack says.
“What Keeley and Freddie do is they ground it so much, and they’re so believable, that actually they can pull it off,” Harry says. “You always see what your actors can do and how much you can push it, and the sillier, out-there stuff felt completely normal. The scripts were quite silly but then they’ve got that emotional grounding in their relationship and they’re both brilliant dramatic actors, which gives you so much. They never play it for comedy or lean into it.”
With both characters holding back secrets from each other in the early stages of the drama, it’s the shared moments that build the dynamic between them and allow viewers to invest in their relationship before events take a dizzying turn – as anyone familiar with the brothers’ work may already expect.
“She’s a bit mean to him and you’re like, ‘Why are you so fucking horrible to him?’ If played a certain way, that could be unpleasant to watch, but because of their performance, you don’t feel that at all,” Harry says. “You know there’s love there and it lets you be funnier, so she can be more horrible. It’s all in the performance, nothing to do with us.”
Hawes and Highmore (The Good Doctor) were more involved in making The Assassin than just their on-screen roles, as both were also executive producers and were keen to offer suggestions on the scripts and then episode cuts during the edit.
“They could watch cuts and go, ‘Well, what about this?’ And you’re not getting notes like, ‘Why isn’t my scene doing that?’ but on the whole show and how it felt to watch, which is really helpful,” Jack says. “Often, they’d both go, ‘Oh, in this scene I remember I did a thing where I was going for this,’ and that was really helpful, when you’re cutting it, for their performance. They know exactly what they did, when and how to bring that out, so we found it incredibly helpful. It’s better for their involvement.”
While The Assassin is Highmore’s first involvement in a Two Brothers production, the project marked a reunion with the Williams siblings for Hawes following her appearance in season two of The Missing – and she’s not the only familiar face in the series. The Tourist alum Shalom Brune-Franklin also stars as Kayla, while Rellik’s Richard Dormer has a cameo.
That familiarity also extends behind the camera, with The Tourist alums Lisa Mulcahy and Daniel Nettheim sharing directing duties. Other cast members include Gina Gershon, Jack Davenport, Alan Dale, Gerald Kyd, Devon Terrell and David Dencik.
“We do try to keep our friends close. It’s nice,” says Harry, who names Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (The Tourist, Boat Story), Daisy Haggard (Back to Life, Boat Story) and Tchéky Karyo (The Missing, Baptiste) among their regular collaborators. “You’re getting the band back together, just sometimes with a different guitarist.”
“Occasionally,” Jack says, “you write it and you go, ‘You know who would be really good for this?’ and the part is better because we wrote it for them in mind. There are quite a few parts in scripts where we’ve gone, ‘Oh, we need someone to do this job, but who could do it?’ And then we think of an actor we know and think, ‘God, they might actually do it,’ because hopefully they had a nice time with us on the last show.
“They don’t want to do the same performance for us. We have to find something interesting for them. If you can find something that feels like it’s going to give them a challenge and be interesting then, yeah, because you know what you’re going to get and you know you can trust them, and you’ve worked with them and you know they’re really nice and collaborative, which is nice and is hard to find sometimes. The more we can do it, the more we do.”
While it was the brothers’ choice to work again with Brune-Franklin, the Australian actor’s limited availability meant Kayla’s screentime had to be pulled back to ensure she could complete her scenes before other commitments. “But it felt a trade-off worth having because we could still find ways to make her character work,” Jack says. “That was our choice. No one was made to do that. But it’s worth it to have her.”
Filming took place across three extremely hot months last summer in and around Athens, with Greece able to double for other locations such as Spain and Albania. Other countries including Croatia were initially considered too, and at one point the brothers thought they might be heading back to Australia. But having originally set the series in Greece in the scripts, the production was ultimately able to shoot there.
As much as they and the cast enjoying spending time together on location, “it was harder than people think,” Jack says. “We had a really nice cast – they’re really nice and hard-working – but they’re long days in massive heat and a lot going on and huge set pieces, with not much time to do them. It was a bit more challenging than everyone would lead you to believe.”
“They’re all so nice that it made it an easy process for everyone,” adds Harry. “When it is that hot, it is tricky to stay awake and stay focused, but there was a general camaraderie, and they all get on so well.”
The pair are now developing a The Missing-lite show for Netflix, which they say is very different from their previous project. In fact, The Assassin might be the peak in their ambitions for heightened thrillers.
“They’re not going to go crazier than this [in the future],” Jack says. “This was a real palate-cleanser. Everyone had come off the back of some big jobs and I think this is as far as we’d push it. But you never know. It evolves all the time. It wasn’t ever meant to get as wild and crazy and breakneck as this became. It just evolved.”
Distributed by All3Media International, the six-part series also promises a satisfying conclusion, though the brothers won’t rule out a second season if the demand is there. “We never want to ask for a second one or leave it open, but there definitely could be,” Harry says. “I’d really like to see more of Keeley and Freddie. That would be my main reason for doing it.”
“They’re such a delight,” Jack concludes. “Any excuse to work with them would be greatly welcomed.”
Like The Assassin? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Killing Eve: A retired MI5 agent is drawn back into an international game of cat-and-mouse with a charismatic female assassin.
The Night Manager: Soon to return for a second season, this espionage thriller follows a former soldier who takes on a dangerous undercover mission within a globe-trotting criminal enterprise.
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