The first season of The Undeclared War ended on a major cliffhanger, so there was a lot to tie up in the opening moments of season 2.
Episode 1 of the new run does this in gripping fashion, by presenting fans with a 10-minute one-shot sequence following Simon Pegg’s Danny as he fights fires in all sorts of places, moving around GCHQ as he does so.
While exclusively speaking with Radio Times about this sequence, Pegg and his co-star Hannah Khalique-Brown, who plays Saara, broke down the experience of filming the impressive opener.
Khalique-Brown said: “We open with this amazing one-shot that goes on for about 10 minutes. We rehearsed for a few days where there are no camera cuts, so it’s a lot of moving parts. It’s a great opener.”
“It took us two days to shoot,” Pegg confirmed. “We got it on the first day, but we did another couple on the second.”
“We didn’t do too many takes,” Khalique-Brown added. “I think maybe we did seven takes or so. We rehearsed it way more than that because it’s basically like a dance.”
When asked whether he had ever filmed anything like it before, Pegg noted: “We did a couple of long shots in Shaun of the Dead, but nothing quite like this. This one was so heavily choreographed because it starts in the situation room, then it goes out into the EMC, then it goes into my office and then back out again.”
Khalique-Brown continued: “There are people crossing, there’s information being delivered and there are false starts. It’s really cool. There’s an amazing moment where you see Simon’s character, Danny, move off into a room while all hell is breaking loose, and he just has to take a breath and calm down.
“You get to see a character who never gets to switch off actually be impacted psychologically by the extremity of the situation he’s in.”
“When you do those one-takes, you’d get four-fifths of the way through it and there’d be one little slip-up, one little fluff of lines,” Pegg said, noting that Danny Sapani had a particularly difficult job because he only enters the scene at the very end.
“He comes in and lands, and then there’s really intense jargon that he’s got to say – really fiddly coding words,” Khalique-Brown said of Sapani. “He had so much pressure on him.”
The new season of The Undeclared War also stars Siân Brooke in a new role as Danny’s wife, Barbara.
The synopsis for the season, which is available to watch in full on Channel 4, says: “Set in 2024, The Undeclared War returns with a fresh wave of tension and drama as the elite Malware Department at GCHQ grapples with the aftermath of a devastating Russian cyber-attack. Just when it seems the UK has gained the upper hand, Danny and the team uncover a far more dangerous threat.”
The Undeclared War season 2 is available to stream in full on Channel 4 now.
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