Peacock Aims For The Future With Mark Rylance & 'The Undeclared War'

Fans of Wolf Hall will rejoice. While the wait continues for the delayed sequel based on Hilary Mantel's third novel The Mirror & The Light, the team has gotten the band back together for a project at U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 co-produced with NBCUniversal's Peacock. BAFTA winner Peter Kosminsky (The State) is teaming back up with Academy Award winner Mark Rylance (Dunkirk) for a brand new near-future series set in post-pandemic England, called The Undeclared War. Rylance will co-star alongside Simon Pegg (best known in the U.S. for the Star Trek and Mission Impossible franchises), who will be taking on a more serious role than American audiences are used to seeing.

According to Deadline, the series, which revolves around a cyberattack on GCHQ that may or may not affect the Parliamentary elections, has been one Kosminsky's been working on for the last three years, with Channel 4 originally greenlighting pre-production in 2018 after charges of Russian meddling in both the 2016 presidential election and the Brexit vote. The series creator and head writer has been researching the hows and whys with intelligence experts in both the U.K. and U.S. to understand just how vulnerable these systems are to attack.

The series was initially conceived as a ten-part series. However, in light of streaming series favoring shorter episode counts to create larger budget projects, the new version will be six installments. Kosminsky wrote four of the six scripts with The Salisbury Poisonings creators Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson collaborating on the writing team.