No time to lie
Actor Shaun Evans and executive producer Tom Leggett discuss how their off-screen partnership paved the way for ITV drama Betrayal, which blends espionage intrigue and domestic drama to tell the story of a spy facing up to a midlife crisis.
For nine seasons and 36 feature-length episodes across 11 years, actor Shaun Evans led the cast of Endeavour, ITV’s prequel to the equally long-running detective drama Inspector Morse.
As the title character, Evans appeared in every episode of a series that charted the young Morse’s career as a detective with the Oxford City Police CID from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. He even stepped behind the camera to direct four episodes.
Now he’s partnering once again with Endeavour producer Mammoth Screen for a contemporary spy thriller he originated alongside Mammoth executive producer Tom Leggett.
Betrayal, a four-part series coming to ITV in 2026, stars Evans as John Hughes, a mid-career MI5 officer navigating a rapidly evolving intelligence landscape while struggling to keep his personal life intact. Acting on a hunch, John meets a British-Iranian man with Stockport gangland links who claims to have intelligence about an imminent plot on UK soil.
When the encounter takes an unexpected turn, John finds himself under internal investigation, facing scrutiny from his superiors, including Simone Grant (Nikki Amuka-Bird), while his partner Claire (Romola Garai) grapples with the secrecy that defines his world.
John’s efforts to save his marriage are complicated by his inability to let the case go. But he finds an unlikely ally in Mehreen Askari-Evans (Zahra Ahmadi), an intelligence operative who is tasked with taking over John’s duties. As John becomes increasingly convinced of the involvement of a hardline faction of the Iranian regime, he also starts to worry there are enemies closer to home. But can he identify the target and avert the attack before it’s too late?
“John is a working-class man and we meet him at the beginning of what I would say is a midlife crisis,” Evans tells DQ. “His relationship is at a crisis point; his relationship with work likewise. And that’s set against the backdrop of espionage.”
Due to the nature of his day job, “he can’t tell his wife or anyone in his immediate family about the day he has had, or indeed any of the days he’s had, and you realise this has had a profound and detrimental effect upon his relationship with his wife,” the actor continues. “That, in a way, is also an inciting incident for the potential unravelling of their relationship. It has a knock-on effect with his bosses at work.
“Then over the next four episodes, it’s about John wrestling and reckoning with whether he did the right thing, if his instincts are still correct, and convincing everyone in his work life that there is something to follow here and there is indeed a threat to national security.”
Evans and Leggett began discussing possible projects on which to partner about five years ago, with Evans’ interest in the spy genre quickly coming to the fore. They then approached playwright David Eldridge about penning the scripts, which were also developed with support from Gordon Corera, the BBC’s former security correspondent who is now presenter of podcast The Rest is Classified.
“So it was something that grew over five years, rather than in other circumstances where a script arrives on your desk and you think, ‘Oh yeah,’” Evans says. “It was something we grew together.”
Mammoth had an “incredibly successful and brilliant collaboration” with Evans on Endeavour and wanted to keep working with him, so that ambition led to discussions about what their next show might look like.
“I’ve been a massive fan of the [spy] genre since I was a child, really,” says Leggett, “and I thought there was a space to do something that wasn’t John le Carré, that wasn’t James Bond, that wasn’t your obvious spy thriller, that had a lot of the same conventional ideas in it but was much more close to the reality of what it’s like to be a spy.”
He also believed Evans would be a “brilliant” spy on screen. “And he is really brilliant, because Shaun has an unknowable quality, which if you work in that game, a lot of them [spies] have that,” Leggett observes. “I thought it’d be really interesting to have a character who was not your public school-educated, entitled, privileged figure, who was maybe from a working-class background albeit now living a middle-class life.
“Then David Eldridge, we were both fans of. He predominantly has been a playwright and writes these extraordinary plays about modern relationships, and also is the son of a market trader from Essex. It felt like he would bring a fusion of that with the spy genre.” It just so happened that Eldridge had also been invited to adapt le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came In From the Cold for the stage, and had already immersed himself in that world.
Corera also “educated” the pair on the realities of being a spy, “and we’ve really tried to forensically replicate that in the show,” Leggett says.
“The reality is that people who are spies, who work for British intelligence, they’re public servants, so they are remunerated on a similar level to other public servants, whether they’re doctors or people who work in a council,” the exec notes. “So what we’re trying to do with Betrayal is bring it closer to reality.
“The truth is you can’t make a show that’s so close to the reality, because reality is often watching people for hundreds of hours, which wouldn’t make for compelling drama. We have lots of great set pieces in the show involving Shaun’s character and Zahra’s character, which are really exciting and really deliver on the thriller stage. But where possible, we’ve tried to make a spy craft as accurate to the reality as we can.”
On screen, Evans partners with Garai to create a convincing portrait of John and Claire’s broken marriage – something made all the more impressive by the fact the pair had never met before working on the series.
“She’s so forensically detailed and so smart and brave,” Evans says of his co-star. “You do your own preparation and then you bring it to the shop floor and you hope you’re met with same preparation from your fellow actors. That’s certainly what happened in this case.”
He also praises Eldridge’s “rich” writing. “You don’t really have to invent a great deal. He’s done the legwork for you,” the actor continues. “Then, of course, you have a period of rehearsal. We had Julian Jarrold, who’s a magnificent director. He is really one of the finest working in the UK at the moment, and you create the space and room to experiment and then you do your work.”
Evans goes on to describe Betrayal, which is distributed by ITV Studios, as “the same as, if not more than, what I expected and hoped it would be” when he and Leggett first started discussing the project. Along the way, they also had to overcome the Covid pandemic and “various ups and downs” and “endless conversations.”
“But the great thing about having history together is you trust [each other], and I always try to work with people who are much smarter than I am. That is the case here,” he says. “So if everything is a conversation with mutual respect, you take in everyone’s point of view, and hopefully you settle on the thing that’s the best for the show.”
“We didn’t want to do something that was just generic, that was a thriller that didn’t really have the depth and integrity,” Leggett says. “Having someone who’s not only a lead actor but also an EP who is constantly pushing for those high creative standards is so helpful, because it means you can turn the project into something you can attract incredible talent to. I really think we have been able to do this on the show.”
That goes for those behind the cameras as much as Evans, Garai and the supporting cast. The DOP is Felix Wiedemann, Adam Tomlinson is the production designer, Sam Marshall is the make-up designer and Orla Mills is the costume designer.
“Everyone believed in what we were trying to do, and that creative ambition and having someone at the heart of it in Shaun, who sets that standard, just gives everyone the permission to bring their best work to it and bring their A-game,” Leggett adds.
For Evans, being there at the start of the project was key. “If you’ve been there from the get-go, you know the story and it’s a very clear line then to being on the shop floor,” he says. “Whereas if you’re an actor brought in at the end, which is also a joyful position to be in, it’s something slightly different. You’re giving your interpretation of something that already exists. In this case, it was something we had created together, and so you’re then just delivering it to the world. That is a very interesting place to be as well.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Slow Horses: A dysfunctional team of MI5 agents, banished to Slough House for past mistakes, discover their exile is anything but dull when they become entangled in deadly national security conspiracies – and must outwit both enemies and their own bosses.
A Spy Among Friends: Friendship and trust unravel when MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott learns that his close partner Kim Philby is a mole for the Soviets, launching a layered study of betrayal, loyalty and the damage wrought by secrets.
The Night Manager: When a hotel manager is recruited by British intelligence to infiltrate the inner circle of an international arms dealer, he must navigate a world where deception is survival and betrayal can come from any quarter.
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tagged in: Betrayal, ITV, ITV Studios, Mammoth Screen, Shaun Evans, Tom Leggett