The new HBO legal drama War has plenty of the courtroom maneuvering, corporate intrigue and sharply dressed attorneys you would expect from a high-stakes legal thriller. But creator George Kay is less interested in simply asking who wins a case than in what happens when people who once loved each other decide to go to war.
That idea came, somewhat unexpectedly, from a stranger’s overheard phone call.
Kay, whose previous credits include the thrillers Hijack and Lupin, told reporters ahead of the series’ Oct. 1 premiere that he originally wanted to make a workplace legal drama about two competing law firms. The problem was finding the right case.
Then, while standing in a queue, he overheard a woman on the phone repeatedly saying “yes” before finally hanging up and declaring, “The bastard signed.”
“I turned around because I’m a nosy man,” Kay recalled. The woman then told him about her four-year divorce battle. Her visible relief at finally reaching the end of it sparked the idea for War.
And so began a series about divorce that quickly becomes much bigger than a divorce.
At the center are Carla (Sienna Miller) and Morgan (Dominic West), a married couple whose increasingly bitter split pits two of London’s most formidable law firms against each other: the old-money Cathcarts & Sons and the newer, ambitious Taylor & Byrne. As the case escalates, loyalties shift, secrets emerge and the audience is repeatedly invited to reconsider exactly who deserves its sympathy.
Or, as Kay and director/executive producer Ben Taylor jokingly put it, the production initially referred to the two firms as “the goodies” and “baddies.”
“I’ll let you decide which way that went,” Taylor said.
That ambiguity is part of the fun.
Phoebe Fox, who plays Serena, a lawyer balancing the demands of her firm, her marriage and an impending child, says her character may initially appear to be on the right side of the battle. But War keeps complicating that assumption.
“She’s actually as ambitious and ruthless as the others,” Fox said. “That’s what’s great about the show, because you think that you’re gunning for somebody, and then they do something that feels… indefensible, maybe.”
For the actors, finding the humanity underneath that ruthlessness was essential.
“You’re always trying to find the humanity in someone,” Fox explained. “You have to find what motivates them, what makes them human and complex.”
Nina Sosanya, who plays attorney Beatrice, sees the profession somewhat differently. For these lawyers, detachment is practically a survival skill.
“There’s a certain detachment that these characters have to employ in order to do the job that they do,” she said. “You have to sort of leave your morals behind and make sure that you don’t get emotionally involved.”
Her colleague Pip Torrens, who plays the morally flexible St John, agreed. “We don’t have a conventional moral sense when it comes to pulling these cases because that wouldn’t be productive or efficient,” he said.
But that doesn’t make the characters villains. Torrens pointed out that the series allows viewers to see enough of their personal lives to understand that they are “real people.”
“They need to win,” he added. “And we need to win as much as Taylor & Byrne.”
That competitive spirit extends right through the cast.
Miller and West, who first worked together about two decades ago in As You Like It on the West End, brought an existing familiarity to Carla and Morgan’s fractured marriage. Their history turned out to be particularly useful when the characters had to go from loving spouses to bitter adversaries.
“We had this history and had seen each other over the years, which I think really informed the history of the relationship that would have been essential to us being married and then in this acrimonious situation,” Miller said.
And then there was the pleasure of playing nasty.
“Going to war with each other is really fun because we love each other and the nastier you can be in something to someone is more fun,” Miller said.
West agreed. Their familiarity made the uglier moments easier to play.
“We had to have that sort of ease with each other,” he said. “And that’s what made the nasty bits so much fun to do.”
The series also makes London itself a character. Kay and Taylor wanted to give the city the kind of glossy television treatment traditionally associated with New York, rather than using it merely as background scenery.
“We wanted to show off London,” Kay said, citing the way American television has historically embraced cities such as Boston and New York as part of the identity of a series.
Taylor was even more determined to give London its due.
“London’s a stunning city, but it tends to not get… missed, because it’s more of a jumble,” he said. “So, we were just really keen on it playing a big character and giving it the best possible sort of treatments.”
The same attention went into the two fictional law firms. Cathcarts’ old-money pedigree is reflected in its labyrinthine, opulent offices, while Taylor & Byrne occupies an even larger and more modern space.
The contrast wasn’t merely cosmetic. Taylor said the sets became a major storytelling tool, allowing the production to visually distinguish the competing teams while giving the filmmakers plenty of room to create the show’s elaborate cross-cutting sequences.
Kay’s scripts frequently move rapidly between the two sides of a case, sometimes showing the firms strategizing almost simultaneously. For Taylor, that created a complicated but rewarding challenge in production and post.
“It’s fiddly, but it’s such a joy in the edit to put those together,” he said.
Then there’s Johnny, played by Archie Renaux, whose position between the two firms makes him one of the show’s biggest sources of tension. The character is effectively playing both sides, driven by an almost desperate desire to succeed.
Renaux described Johnny as “really earnest,” but said his desperation outweighs his morals at times.
“He hasn’t really got time to think about repercussions,” the actor said. “He’s just in the moment.”
Renaux found an unusual way to convey Johnny’s nervousness, drawing inspiration from Michael J. Fox and even HBO’s The Jinx. He and Taylor experimented with having Johnny burp when he was feeling guilty.
“I did a lot of burping at one point,” Renaux admitted. “I don’t know how much of it actually made the final cut.”
Taylor’s response: “It’s a good drinking game. You’ll find them in there.”
If War sounds like a straightforward legal thriller, the series is considerably more interested in the emotional collateral damage than the legal technicalities. Kay said the writers had to learn about the various stages of divorce — mediation, settlement, arbitration and litigation — but the real dramatic question was how much suffering they could put the characters through.
“It’s just the emotional toll that we were doing and trying to see how much we could make everyone suffer, really,” he said.
That suffering begins almost immediately for Carla. She believes she has taken control of her divorce, only to have the papers served on her in a very public and humiliating fashion at her own premiere. Suddenly, she’s no longer dictating the terms.
Miller sees Carla as someone who is accustomed to operating within her own orbit.
“She is very confident at the beginning because she’s had this idea, she’s caught him,” Miller said. But being served publicly changes the equation. “She’s wrong-footed, she’s reactive as a person, she doesn’t do well with being backed into a corner.”
And Miller clearly enjoys that side of her character.
“She’s quite vicious and I like that about her.”
West’s Morgan presents another kind of contradiction. He’s a billionaire who, despite his immense wealth, is attempting to behave honorably during the divorce — or at least believes he is.
“He’s desperately trying to remember why he loves his wife,” West said of Morgan’s battle between love and the increasingly adversarial legal process.
Kay had described Morgan to West as “a benign billionaire,” which the actor found an intriguing proposition. Morgan wants to create a social-media platform designed to do good and is prepared to acknowledge Carla’s role in building the business and give her “tens of millions.”
But this is War, so even the supposedly good guy gets moments that reveal another side.
West singled out a scene in which Morgan challenges another man to strip in exchange for a million dollars.
“Ruthless, horrible, bullying scene,” West said. “And it was great to play those two things.”
That duality extends to the marriages surrounding the central couple. Fox’s Serena and her husband Nick are expecting their first child while simultaneously dealing with the financial and professional pressures of their own lives. Torrens described St John and Beatrice’s relationship as another partnership with its own complicated rules. Even the junior lawyers have what Torrens called a “quirky marriage of convenience.”
Those relationships are not incidental. Kay says the central case of each season will establish a larger thematic framework for the entire series.
Season one is about marriage. Season two, he revealed, will revolve around defamation and reputation, allowing the legal case to echo through the personal relationships of the lawyers and clients.
“We take the central case and you kind of apply it to the rest of the cast,” Kay explained.
That also means viewers will get to know different sides of characters who initially seem easy to categorize. Kay noted that season one tends to align the audience more closely with Taylor & Byrne while enjoying the “dastardly tactics” of Cathcarts. Season two will shift the perspective.
“There’s no fun in just writing characters that are doing dastardly things,” Kay said. “You want to understand them properly.”
For a series built around opposing sides, that’s perhaps the most revealing philosophy of War: nobody stays neatly on one side for long.
And judging by the cast’s own playful arguments during the press conference — complete with accusations of who the real “baddies” are — they seem to have embraced that idea completely.
