Anthony Horowitz’s young spy Alex Rider hits Amazon Prime Video on Thursday June 4, with his adventures at Point Blanc forming the basis of the first season. Last summer, Greg D. Smith was invited along to the London set…

 

 

It’s a boiling hot July day in a summer that seems set on going on for some time, and I’m sat in a darkened room several floors up in a mostly derelict office building with no air conditioning somewhere in central London. In front of me, a monitor shows a scene being recorded several rooms away. In the scene, which I’m watching for perhaps the tenth time today, Alex Rider is finding out for the first time the truth about his Uncle and what his own destiny will be in the shadowy world of MI6, briefed by Mrs Jones and Alan Blunt. The contrast between the slick briefing room and the building that I’m in couldn’t be greater, but the scene somehow has me gripped no matter how many times I watch it.

Yes, this is the latest screen incarnation of Anthony Horowitz’s teenaged superspy character Alex Rider, coming to Amazon Prime Video as an eight part television series directed by Andreas Prochaska (Das Boot), written for TV by Guy Burt (Murder in Mind, The Bletchley Circle) and starring Otto Farrant as the titular hero.

If there’s a theme that runs through the entire day of speaking to various cast members and creatives involved with the show, it’s that they’re pitching this one for that holiest of grails – the spot where adults and kids can enjoy it equally.

Partly, this is a function of economics – as Horowitz himself points out, if you’re making something on this sort of scale and budget, you can’t afford for it to have only niche appeal. ‘We don’t want to be competing with a $200 million Avengers movie,’ he says, but at the same time there’s a certain standard in modern TV, brought about by the revolution of shows like Game of Thrones and others, where TV looks, if not as good as movies, then almost. It’s in fact that revolution that’s brought the series to life now. Horowitz says that the BBC showed interest years ago, before that revolution happened, so nothing came of it – now in the age of big budget TV, seems the perfect time.

It’s also a function of the property itself. It’s now twenty years since Horowitz first wrote Stormbreaker, the novel that launched the series, and he’s very aware that a large portion of his audience will be kids who picked that book up when it first came out and are now adults themselves. One of those adults is the very child upon whom the character was originally based – the son of a friend.

The series then, is somewhat grittier than the books, dealing less with gadgets and more with creating a grounded, believable rendition of a modern world setting where the intelligence services turn to a teenaged boy who just happens to have been training for the role his entire life without ever having realised it. This is a theme that comes up time and again, from Horowitz to writer Guy Burt, who felt very free in terms of his ability to bring a new take on the material.

That take includes new character Kira – a female lead who Burt wanted as a sort of dealbreaker. ‘A condition of my involvement was that there had to be a female character who could hold her own against Alex,’ he says. Having previously worked on The Bletchley Circle, it’s clear that Burt’s heart lies in bringing more and better female characters to our screens, and Kira is described a ‘slow burner’ a sort of ‘young Lisbeth Salander’ who will become more significant as the series goes on.

He also clearly enjoyed developing Mrs Jones, the mentor/handler character who is played here by Vicky McClure. Though McClure herself had not read the books, she questioned her nephew about them when going for the part and was impressed by the fact that not only was he a fan, but his school was organising a trip abroad that was themed around the locations and adventures from the books. It’s also a rare chance for her to be in something her nephews can watch, compared to the majority of her acting catalogue, though she feels that age appropriateness is somewhat of a blurred subject these days. ‘There’s such a variety of TV now…kids are watching stuff they shouldn’t, and I like the odd Disney film!’

This, she says, has surprised her, having assumed the books would be quite light, and she’s enjoyed exploring the complex relationship Burt has developed in his script for the character with Alex, as she works both as Alex’s main contact with the Division (the name of the MI6 offshoot run by Blunt in the show) and also as his handler, developing a maternal outlook for him as she battles her desire to do the job with the equal impulse to protect him. Indeed, Burt says that this is factored into the reason Blunt chooses her, knowing that she’ll challenge him when he’s pushing his new teenaged agent too far.

And as for that agent, how is Otto Farrant finding it, suddenly being the onscreen incarnation of the hero whose adventures he read as a kid, back when ‘everyone’ was reading them? He didn’t even realise that there were over 650 auditionees for the part until after he’d landed it, and oddly when he reached the final day of auditions and the crew were testing different combinations of Alexes and Toms, Brenock O’Connor (lately of Game of Thrones fame as Olly) only had the opportunity to do that audition with Otto. ‘If he was crap, I wasn’t getting the job,’ says O’Connor in a typically good-natured bit of banter that characterises the interview with the two. He also goes on to say later that from that first meeting, he’s had Farrant saved in his phone as ‘Otto Rider’ – ‘I knew he’d get it, and I just prayed that I’d be the Tom to go along.’

Have either of them watched Stormbreaker, the 2006 feature film debut of the character? ‘No’ says Farrant firmly. They tell a story of a movie night after they’d first got the news, and Brenock bringing a selection of films including Stormbreaker, which Farrant refused to watch (‘we watched Reservoir Dogs instead’). Not, one senses, because of nerves, but because this serious, yet totally unassuming young man is keen to make the part his own. He feels that the audience gets to find out just who exactly Rider is as the show goes on, and he’s consciously tried to avoid taking from elsewhere to get there, including the novels. ‘I’ve really tried to take the character and put my own spin on it, without taking away from the core.’

Everyone seems full of praise for Farant’s efforts. McClure says he’s ‘worked his arse off’ the whole time’, Horowitz describes him as the ideal person to play the part: someone who – along with O’Connor and Ronke Adekoluejo as Jack Starbright – forms part of a magical trinity who he and the other casting team instantly knew were ‘the ones’ when they were in the room together.

It certainly seems as if this is the start of something. There’s an excited tension to everyone involved, that goes beyond the normal sort of ‘presser’ energy. Horowitz very much sees it as the start of a whole long-running series, Burt has been reading ahead from day one to see if there’s any future elements he needs to be aware of as he tries to plan out more series, and McClure and co-star Ace Bhatti, who plays John Crawley, seem excited by the prospect of getting to do more. ‘This is the closest I’m gonna get to being in James Bond,’ declares Bhatti, pleased with himself that he got to do a bit of stunt driving for the role.

For Horowitz and Burt, the appeal of the character is simple – ‘It began with me being a miserable kid at boarding school…and the one thing I would look forward to every year was the Bond film.’ When Moore got too old in the part, Horowitz realised that what he wanted to see was a Bond-like character but much younger, starting off and not as polished – thus was Alex born.

For Burt, it’s something that tags into a more real world issue. ‘There’s a sense in the world that there are adolescents out there right now who are having to do adults’ jobs. The people who are speaking the most sense [on stuff like climate change] seem to be kids, so anything like this that blurs the boundaries will speak to adolescents very clearly because they see those boundaries being blurred anyway.’

And do O’Connor and Farrant feel it relates to their own experiences of being teenagers? ‘Going to parties, being no good at talking to girls and saving the world, yeah, feels pretty relatable,’ O’Connor winks.

One thing seems certain – this show may be based on a line of popular children’s books, but it’s definitely not just for kids.

Alex Rider premieres on Amazon Prime Video on June 4. Thanks to Nikita Chaudry for help in arranging the set visit.