The Courier
Based on the incredible true story of a businessman turned spy.
Country
Production
Budget
$0
Box office
$26 001 227
Website
Director
Dominic Cooke
Actors
Benedict Cumberbatch, Merab Ninidze, Rachel Brosnahan, Jessie Buckley, Angus Wright, Kirill Pirogov, Iva Šindelková, Vladimir Chuprikov, Fred Haig, Emma Penzina
All actors and roles (10)
All actors and roles (10)
Scenario
Producer
Ben Browning, Rory Aitken, Ben Pugh, Adam Ackland, Benedict Cumberbatch, Glen Basner, Tom O'Connor, Dominic Cooke, Milan Popelka, Josh Varney
Camera operator
Composer
Artist
Suzie Davies
Audition
Nina Gold, Alena Garetovskaya, Arwa Salmanova
Editing
Short description
Cold War spy Greville Wynne and his Russian source try to put an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
What's left behind the scenes
- At the beginning of the film, there is a mention of the CIA's failure with a certain Popov. This refers to Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, a GRU officer who collaborated with the CIA during World War II and then became a double agent in Vienna. Popov transmitted valuable intelligence information to the West, in particular, he warned the CIA about the USSR's successes in gathering information about the U-2 aircraft. Over time, Popov began to be suspected, and in 1958 he was dismissed from the GRU, and a year later he was arrested. The film begins in August 1960, but Popov was already executed in January 1960.
- The screenwriter, Tom O’Connor, became interested in the history of Soviet-American spy games during the 2016 US presidential election. In particular, he was attracted to Oleg Penkovsky (1919-1963), who is played by Merab Ninidze in this film, and with whom Greville Maynard Wynne (1919-1990), a British businessman recruited by "MI-6", collaborated.
- Benedict Cumberbatch lost almost 10 kilograms for filming the scenes of Greville Wynne's time in a Soviet prison.
- In reality, Vinna was detained in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, shortly before the opening of a trade fair that he himself had organized. He was almost immediately extradited to the USSR.
- Vinna was exchanged for a Soviet intelligence officer named Konon Molodyy (1922-1970), who was an illegal operative working in London under the name Gordon Lonsdale, as depicted in Robert Tronson's (1924-2008) film “Ring of Spies” (1964). Molodyy once worked in the US under the direction of Rudolf Abel (1903-1971), about whom Steven Spielberg made the dramatic thriller “Bridge of Spies” (2015).
- The original title of the film translates to 'Courier'.
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Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
