Latest news with #TheAmericans
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Costa Ronin Joins ‘The Terminal List' For Season 2
EXCLUSIVE: Costa Ronin (For All Mankind, The Americans) has been cast as a recurring guest star on Prime Video's The Terminal List for Season 2, starring and executive produced by Chris Pratt. Created by David DiGilio, the series follows James Reece after his entire platoon of Navy SEALs is ambushed during a high-stakes covert mission. He returns home to his family with conflicting memories of the event and questions about his culpability. But as new evidence comes to light, Reece discovers dark forces working against him, endangering not only his life, but the lives of those he loves. More from Deadline 'The Boys' Team, Riding Ratings Surge, Says Season 5 Will Include Things "You're Not Going To Have On Your Bingo Card" 'The Bondsman' Canceled By Prime Video After One Season J.R. Ramirez Joins Erinn Hayes & Scott Foley In Amazon's 'It's Not Like That' Ronin will play billionaire and media mogul, Vasili Adrenov. Season 1 was based on Jack Carr's novel of the same name, and Season 2 is drawing from Carr's book True Believer. Season 2 of The Terminal List is executive produced by Pratt through Indivisible Productions, DiGilio, Antoine Fuqua and Kat Samick through Hill District Media, author Carr, former Army Ranger Max Adams, and former Navy SEAL Jared Shaw. The Terminal List is a co-production from Amazon MGM Studios and Civic Center Media, in association with MRC. Ronin recently wrapped on season 5 of the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind and Season 4 of The Morning Show, also from the streamer. Additional credits include the Netflix series Obliterated, the NBC series Endgame, directed by Justin Lin, The Americans on FX Network, and Homeland for Showtime. On the comedy side, Ronin was a regular opposite Jenna Fischer in the ABC half-hour single-camera comedy Splitting Up Together. In film, he can be seen starring in the independent feature ISS, opposite Chris Messina, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival. Other recent film credits include Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, directed by Quentin Tarantino opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie, as well as Brighton Beach starring opposite FKA Twigs. Ronin is repped by Link Entertainment. Best of Deadline Everything We Know About The 'Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping' Movie So Far Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies In Order - See Tom Cruise's 30-Year Journey As Ethan Hunt
Geek Tyrant
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Intense Trailer for Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys's Psychological Thriller HALLOW ROAD — GeekTyrant
Universal has released the trailer for a upcoming psychological thriller titled Hallow Road , with stars Rosamund Pike ( Gone Girl ) and Matthew Rhys ( The Americans ). In the film, two parents receive a distressing late-night call from their teenage daughter, who has just accidentally hit a pedestrian. They jump in their car, racing to get there before anyone else stumbles across the scene. As they head deeper into the night, disturbing revelations threaten to tear the family apart as they soon realize they might not be the only ones driving down Hallow Road. The movie was directed by Babak Anvari ( Under the Shadow, I Came By ) from a script written by William Gillies. It also stars Megan McDonnell ( Normal People ). Anvari is also attached to direct a new Cloverfield movie that is said to be a direct sequel to the original 2008 film. The psychological thriller will be released in UK theaters on May 16th. US distribution has not yet been set. It looks like a super intense and unsettling movie.
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Illegals by Shaun Walker review – gripping true stories of spies who lived deep undercover
O ne of the best series of the golden age of TV drama, The Americans (2013-2018), centred on a pair of Russian sleeper agents operating in suburban Washington DC during the height of the cold war. By day they seemed to be a boring married American couple; by night they set honey traps, sabotaged facilities, recruited traitors and assassinated enemies. That story was based in part on the real-life pair of 'illegals' – as spies living under deep cover in civil society are called – Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov, who pretended to be Canadians living in Cambridge, Massachussetts, until their arrest and deportation in 2010. In reality, they weren't so successful: owing to the turning of another Soviet agent, they were closely monitored by the FBI for years and never managed anything nefarious enough to make it worth charging them with espionage. Vavilova and Bezrukov's story is one of many in this thoroughly gripping and eye-opening book, which shows amply how the life of someone chosen by the KGB to venture abroad as an illegal was nonetheless never without drama, glamour and heartbreak. Agents were forced to leave their infant children back in the USSR for years, acquired multiple romantic entanglements, or were driven to drink and burnout. Some of the earlier illegals could have swaggered out of an Ian Fleming novel. The Lithuanian Iosif Grigulevich, for one, a self-described 'romantic', transformed himself into a charismatic Costa Rican diplomat called Teodoro Castro, and was sent to assassinate the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito with a powdered version of bubonic plague. (The hit was called off when Stalin conveniently died.) Another man with an amazing life, Yuri Linov, was spotted by the spooks for his early talent in foreign languages, trained in East Germany, and then sent abroad. He impersonated an Austrian bath-mat salesman in Ireland, moved to Czechoslovakia to report on dissidents, and thence to Israel to gather information about its nuclear facility, before being kicked out by the Shin Bet. The work wasn't all exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff, though, as Walker notes wryly of Linov's task of painstakingly transcribing secret radio communications: 'It could take Yuri hours of work to decode a message, only to find he was being heartily congratulated on the forty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution.' For the Soviets the use of illegals was an asymmetrical form of cold warfare. It was a necessity when the nascent USSR did not yet have diplomatic relations with other powers or embassies from which normal spies could operate. But the Americans could never accomplish the same thing in the 'bureaucracy-obsessed' enemy heartland. They concluded: 'It was simply much harder for CIA illegals to infiltrate a rigid police state without detection than it was for Soviet illegals to enter the freer atmosphere of the West.' Indeed, it was ordinary information about this freer atmosphere, Walker argues persuasively, that was probably the most valuable intelligence. Paranoid totalitarianism, with no independent news media, found it difficult to imagine a freewheeling world of dive bars, hippy protests and supermarkets. The heyday of the illegal seemed to have passed with the fall of the Soviet Union, after which émigré Russians could travel under their real identities without immediately being suspected of espionage. (Flame-haired spy Anna Chapman was welcomed as a real-estate agent in New York City.) But one fan of the old ways was a former KGB support officer for illegals – Vladimir Putin. And so the story continues. Putin is happy to deploy 'flying illegals' such as the pair who tried to murder Sergei Skripal in 2018, as well as the newfangled form of pseudonymous online illegal – fake social-media users with American-sounding names – created by Russian troll farms to destabilise the west. All this, Walker suggests, is a deliberate continuation of Putin's mission to restore pride in Russian history and derring-do. Western spooks now tend to downplay the threat from illegals, but then, as one tells the author, what if you had someone who was in a position to do real damage? 'Then it becomes the most dangerous thing imaginable.' skip past newsletter promotion Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. after newsletter promotion The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker is published by Profile (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
New York Post
27-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Meet Russia's real-life ‘Americans' — spies hiding in plain sight
Ann Foley, a part-time real estate agent, lived a middle-class, all-American lifestyle with her husband, Don, and their two sons, in Cambridge, Mass., home of many of America's most prestigious universities and think tanks. But the likeable, friendly couple had a very secret life. Ann was, in fact, Elena Vavilova, a deep-cover spy trained by the secret Russian intelligence agency, the notorious KGB. Don, her seemingly pleasant husband, was actually Andrei Bezrukov, also a KGB agent. Advertisement 11 A scene from the television show 'The Americans,' which dramatized the real-life Russian spy operation that saw operatives embed themselves throughout American communities. FX In June 2010, the couple, both illegals in the US, was arrested by the FBI. In New York City, meanwhile, Anna Chapman also worked in real estate, but lived a far different lifestyle than Ann Foley. Voluptuous and flame-haired, Chapman had a reputation for flirting with her potential property clients — the Big Apple's men of power and wealth. Advertisement But the two women, Foley and Chapman, did have one commonality. 11 Russian siren-spy Anna Chapman during her heyday as a hot-shot New York City real estate agent. AP Chapman, too, was a secret Russian agent here to spy on America. In 2010, she was arrested with nine other Russian spies, with authorities breaking up one of the largest intelligence networks in the US since the end of the Cold War. Advertisement It took decades for the FBI to unravel Russia's most secret spy program. Now author Shaun Walker, in 'The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West' (Knopf), has written a riveting and revelatory history of the Soviet Union's spy program that asks the reader — do you really know who your neighbors are? 11 The headquarters of the Russian Security Service in Moscow, where most of Russia's secret spy operations were planned and operated. ASSOCIATED PRESS From the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been sending spies to America and elsewhere to obtain top secret information via undercover operatives. Posing as foreign aristocrats, Persian merchants, or Turkish students — and, of course, friendly real estate agents — they used their wit, charm and sex to gather intelligence. Many went abroad as diplomats who could quickly escape by claiming diplomatic immunity. When the Russians were our allies during World War II, their spies slipped behind enemy lines to assassinate Nazi officials and steal Third Reich technological secrets. During the Cold War, they were sent far from home, writes Walker, 'to lie low as sleepers in the West.' Advertisement In the 1950s, the KGB invested years of training to transform ordinary Soviet citizens into convincing Westerners whom they would send abroad for decades camouflaged in a foreign skin. The program was called the illegals — the most ambitious espionage program in history. 11 An identification used by Vladimir Lenin in 1917 to hide his identity, among the earliest example of Soviet spycraft. SCRSS / TopFoto The KGB, according to the author, put young Soviets, like the pretend Foleys of Cambridge, through years of training in language and etiquette to transform them into Westerners, blending into their host societies. Some performed remarkable feats, while others cracked under the strain of living a double life. 'The illegals were the only Soviet citizens allowed to move freely in the West without oversight: around 100 people, from a population of 290 million. The illegals saw and heard things that no other Soviet citizen, even those in the elites, could dream of experiencing,' writes the author. Moscow's illegals program advanced the concept of using a business executive or other innocent-seeming professional as a spy — sent abroad to embed themselves in Western societies to influence politics, military strategy, international affairs and global security. 'Anyone who met a Russian diplomat asking lots of questions would certainly wonder if their new contact was a spy. But who would suspect a Canadian real estate agent of being a deep-cover KGB operative,' observes Walker, who was able to track down and interview many who were part of the illegals program. Advertisement 11 Russian-leader Vladimir Putin has continued his nation's long-tradition of hiding spies within US communities. Wikipedia It all seemed right out of a Hollywood movie script. And from 2013 to 2018, in fact, a popular TV series called 'The Americans' — a period spy drama — explored the lives of two illegals posing as an American couple and living in a Washington, DC suburb, spying while raising their two American-born children. In the case of the fake Foleys, KGB spotters found Vavilova and Andrei Bezrukov when they were college students in the Siberian city of Tomsk, selected them for vetting and put them through 'an arduous training program lasting several years, molding their language, mannerisms, and identities into those of an ordinary Canadian couple,' writes the author. Advertisement 11 Accused syp Col. Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, a Soviet-era spy who hid in plain sight in the US during the 1950s. AP They left the Soviet Union separately, re-connected in Canada pretending they had never met and re-married as Don and Ann. They began spying for the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence agency, and moved to Cambridge when Don won a place at Harvard's Kennedy School. He networked at Harvard while she played the role of a soccer mom by day — while by night she decrypted radio messages from Moscow. They never spoke a word of Russian to each other or mentioned Russia to their two sons from that day forward — until they were arrested and deported to Russia. Their son, Alex, refused to believe that his parents were spies until he was shown old photos of them wearing KGB uniforms. 'It finally sank in that his whole upbringing had been a lie,' writes Walker. 'There was nothing quite like it in the history of espionage.' Advertisement 11 Don Foley — a Russian spy actually named Andrei Bezrukov — managed to secure himself a position at the Harvard Kennedy School. Anna Chapman was an entirely different story, according to the author, who met with the buxom, red-haired spy in Moscow, but she declined to say anything about her espionage work. Her ex-British husband later claimed he had been hoodwinked into marrying the beauty, which helped secure her a British passport. After she was arrested, he sold off marital bedroom photos and fed salacious stories to the tabloids about their wild sex life. 11 Russian spy Andrei Bezrukov with this sons Alex and Tim in Niagara Falls. Courtesy Alex Vavilov Advertisement The author writes that there was almost no awareness of KGB illegals operating in the US until New York couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg ignited headlines when they were arrested, convicted of spying, and sent to the electric chair in 1953 — guilty of transmitting top secret information to the Soviet Union. Their sons would later claim their parents were set up during the hysteria of the Cold War and Red Scare. In 1957, Rudolf Abel faced charges of conspiracy to transmit military and atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. 11 Alex Vavilov as an adult after his parents were sent back to Russia. CBC News: The National Abel's real name was William Fisher, but he used the name Rudolf Abel, which belonged to a KGB colleague. He was tried, found guilty, but spared the electric chair and sentenced to 30 years in prison. This was a wake-up call for the Western intelligence agency of the possible numbers of illegals in this country, the author asserts. Abel became a household name when he was described in a Life magazine story as 'a masterful spy who had successfully slipped himself into the stream of American life.' Abel's trial finally pushed Western intelligence agencies to take notice — and action. 'They wondered how it would be possible to sniff out other illegals, and marveled at the ingenuity of the Soviet program,' writes Walker. Of the spies, 'Many cracked under the pressure: some had breakdowns, others defected or were caught.' It appears different today as evidenced by the reported number of illegals with apparent ties to America's enemies who entered the country during the open border policy of the Biden administration, and have gone underground at a time when the world's hotspots grow hotter, with America as the targeted epicenter. 11 Author Shaun Walker. Kasia Strek 'There was the chance that the Cold War might turn hot and today's delivery boy, actually an illegal, could become a vital link in a communications network during WWIII,' Walker warns.
Telegraph
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Andor creator Tony Gilroy: ‘My Star Wars characters are based more on Trotsky than Trump'
'They came to me with all these problems, but I said, 'Well, everybody dies. You keep that and everything can be fixed,'' explains Tony Gilroy, 68, when we meet in his London hotel room. This is how the screenwriter, director and producer recalls the conversation with Lucasfilm when they brought him in to retool the 2016 Star Wars prequel, Rogue One, after its original director Gareth Edwards delivered a version they deemed unsuitable. Despite its unpromising history, Rogue One is regularly voted the best Star Wars film outside the original trilogy, and its spin-off series, Andor – a prequel to the movie, following its reluctant revolutionary Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) – is almost universally acclaimed as the greatest of the Star Wars TV shows. But it, again, nearly ran aground, with an early concept – developed first by current chief creative officer of Disney Animation, Jared Bush, then The Americans show-runner Stephen Schiff, and featuring Cassian plus battle droid K-2 solving adventures every week – also considered off-the-mark. Gilroy was again flown in, and suggested they focus instead on taking Cassian from 'cockroach to butterfly.' They agreed… but then, by his account, he almost sunk the series himself. It was in this very room, he recalls, that the first season was saved by a 4am phone call telling him to flee the country. 'That was the last flight out as Covid hit,' he nods. 'But it saved the show. It's shocking how ignorant I was about the scale of what we were doing at the start. Really vaingloriously dumb. We had a writers' room, I was directing, budgeting and casting, all the while with this terrible anxiety that I had ruined my life. I was waking up every day going, 'Oh my God, what have I done?' Covid reset the whole table.' Grounded in Hollywood, and now with more thinking time and a fresh perspective, he tore up scripts and started organising a new team. 'I turned into a cockpit creator,' he grins. 'I started doing meetings on Zoom, which really helped me remember everyone's names.' He hired British directors Toby Hayes, Susannah White and Ben Caron of Black Mirror, Generation Kill and Sherlock fame and recruited Chernobyl production designer Luke Hull. Lockdown's shifting restrictions even meant some UK locations were easier to shoot in – like the Barbican and Canary Wharf. Gilroy cannot praise British craft enough. While Jon Favreau shot The Mandalorian in a Volume (a 3D special effects studio), New York-born Gilroy preferred sets and building whole villages and towns at Pinewood… and the quality of the 400-odd speaking-part actors. 'Another American show-runner said, 'You're going to be a pig in s--t with actors',' he grins with delight. 'British directors won't hire them because they've been on EastEnders or did a TV commercial, but the talent pool here is sick. People show up on time, know their lines, and respect what they do.' It was, he says mournfully, old-school shooting. 'I don't think they'll make TV shows like this in the same way ever again,' he sighs. 'I watched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly where Clint [Eastwood] comes up to the prisoner camp in the desert with 700 extras and I got so sad. Can you imagine the social life on set for that month? What a gas it was to be there? No one's ever going do that again. You'd tile the crowd. You'd CGI the set. All that fun is gone. I just don't see anybody doing a show like this on that scale again.' As with Rogue One, Gilroy brought a brutal reality to the Star Wars universe, and has said that Cassian was based on Stalin. 'Irony doesn't work in print,' he sighs, when I bring that up. 'What I meant was, why did Lenin like Stalin so much? Because he was an earner. He brought the money. With Andor, I'm basically using history to explain the buffet of contradictions that are in a rebellion. The French Resistance is a Rebel Alliance of Gaullists and Communists and the Maquis, and you know they'll all kill each other the moment it's over. That's what Andor is about – how great powers build alliances of people who hate each other.' Part of the joy of his work is his eye for this hatred in everyday life, no matter how extreme the circumstances. In season two he luxuriates in it. Divided into four mini-movies of three episodes, each chunk covers a year between the end of the first season and the start of Rogue One. It's hard to discuss without spoilers, but… Inept Imperial Security Bureau agent Syril (Kyle Soller) is buffeted around by his superiors who use him as bait in the Empire's deadly scheming. Denise Gough 's ambitious ISB true-believer Dedra attempts to root out Rebels with mixed success. Luthen struggles to keep things together as his schemes become too tangled. Everyone is warring as much with their own side as their enemy. And, beautifully, everyone has to deal with jobsworths and tech desks who chatter away self-importantly about 'not sitting there if I were you,' or 'I need a location to follow the signal… sir.' In Star Wars, prequels can be dangerous. Fans revere the lore, despite its staggering inconsistencies, and they dislike innovation. If you want a rabbit hole to fall down, Star Wars fans complaining is infinite. 'The thing about the Star Wars community is they all disagree on everything and the moment they stop chewing on you, they start chewing on each other,' shrugs Gilroy. 'My mandate is to be rigorous, and we've cleaned up some canonical messes, but with this show we've effectively made eight Star Wars movies. We're responsible for as much canon as anybody. Some people have a problem: 'It's not for kids. There aren't enough creatures in it.' Well, I don't make that show. Sorry.' This makes sense when he talks about his early years. The son of a sculptor and writer, he grew up in small-town America, went to a school where academic excellence meant you'd be bullied, and left home at 16 – 'I loved my parents, but I got out of there as fast I could.' He dropped out of Boston University to make it in a band and spent a few years moving coast to coast working in bars and playing gigs, trying to write novels and knocking out a screenplay purely to make some money. He found, to his surprise, he was good at it. His main two opponents, he says, are authority and himself. 'I really hate repeating myself, and my anti-authoritarian instinct is always there,' he laughs. 'It's a curse. I'm old enough to know how to mask it, but my instinct is always to f--k with the thing and not do what I'm supposed to.' He got hold of Stars Wars, dumped the merch and added the Russian Revolution and death. He tested Lucasfilm by writing episode one of the first season with Cassian in a brothel looking for his sister and killing cops. Season two's budget of over $290 million was another challenge – Gilroy asked for a boost to their $230 million, just as Disney was cutting budgets, saying he'd prefer to leave Andor as a stand-alone than deliver a cheap follow up. 'I was testing them all the time and they always said, 'Okay',' he shrugs. Potentially equally testing has been the return of Trump to the White House. Has there any imperative from Lucasfilm to adjust the depiction of the Empire in light of a presidency that could be seen to mirror it? 'If I were you, I would ask me that question,' accepts Gilroy. 'But it was all written before that, and I honestly want the show to be timeless. My characters are based more on Trotsky than Trump. I'm fascinated by revolutions. If I tried to sell a movie script about a young revolutionary dying for the cause, no-one's going to back me. In fact, I'm trying to get a $40 million movie made right now; everybody loves the script, but they all say it's really original. So, I'm f----d. But if you tell it as Star Wars, you have a place to play.' That said, is he now done with the Star Wars universe? 'You never say never, but I certainly hope so,' he nods as we wind up our chat. ' God, I hope so. Remember what I said about repeating myself? I'm more the revolutionary who just moves on, the troublemaker who keeps making a mess, then heads off to the next one.'
