'London Spy' Finale Postmortem: Edward Holcroft on Alex's Fate

Warning: This interview contains spoilers for the finale of BBC America’s London Spy.

The wait is over. After five weeks of wondering what happened to Alex (Edward Holcroft), the finale of London Spy gave us answers. And it was even more horrifying and heartbreaking than viewers of the BBC America love story-turned-mystery could have predicted.

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MI6 had placed Alex in that trunk, and when he awoke to find himself there, Frances (Charlotte Rampling), the woman who’d raised him to be a spy, had to try to convince him to move to America and leave behind both Danny (Ben Whishaw) and, more importantly, his work. Though Alex reluctantly agreed, MI6 used his own lie-detection technique against him to determine that he wasn’t being truthful when he said he’d go, never see Danny again, and forget about his work — and when he returned Frances’s “I love you.” Though Frances begged for a chance to speak to him again, she was drugged and driven home while Alex was left to die.

Holcroft spoke to Yahoo TV about filming that brutal scene.

Take us through shooting Alex’s final scene. Were you actually in a box?
I was. They put me in a trunk, and… yeah, it was hard. I’m not going to lie. I haven’t got a problem with small spaces or claustrophobia or anything like that, but I remember, when we did it, Charlotte Rampling was on the other side of the box to read the lines — it was really quite moving, actually. And when we cut, I got out and I was getting quite upset. I didn’t know why. I was naked, and it was a very comfortable set to work on and everyone was incredibly sensitive and professional. But I remember when I got out, I just wanted space, and I could feel it brewing up in me. Charlotte became my mom almost and was sort of like, “Everyone, get out of the way. Give him space. Leave him alone.” She was so sweet, which made me get even more upset.

Had you been filming the scene for hours?
At least three quarters of a day, so a good five to six hours. I wasn’t in the box for six hours, but it was more the psychological aspect of it — the thought of, if that could happen to someone, if you could be stuck in the space that small… It was hard, but it looked good, so I’m happy.

And since we don’t actually see Alex take his last breath after he’s left there to die, you can imagine those final moments as a viewer and its haunts you. Did you film his last breath?
No, that was pretty much it. I had friends, people who’ve watched the last episode, saying, “Are you sure you’re dead, or did you come out after?” People didn’t want to fully believe that he’s dead. They still think that there’s a twist. They still think Alex went to America.

Creator Tom Rob Smith has said he never intended for it to be ambiguous, whether Alex was really dead, even when his body was found at the end of the premiere.
The whole story is so ambiguous by nature. When I read the scripts, that was what I loved about it. It was different: you couldn’t place anything anywhere, compared to so many scripts that one reads now, where you can sort of predict things very fast and it’s all kind of the same. I love the unpredictability. It makes it haunting. It makes it uncomfortable. It was sort of quite fitting that it just ended in the way it did.

Going back to the premiere, whenever Alex turned up the radio and told Danny that he couldn’t go anywhere without getting a new battery for his computer… did he know that something was about to happen to him?
I think he knew. He’s a very intelligent man, and I think he knew that his world would be watching him very closely, because of his relationship with Danny and when he started his work on creating this theory of proving lying. I was playing it like he knew that it’s probably just a matter of time before they do something. Whether or not he knew that they were going to the extent of taking him away or killing him, I don’t know. But I think when you work for people like that and there are secrets that are that important, you know the full consequences.

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It’s clear why he wouldn’t want to leave Danny, the only person he’s ever connected with. In your mind, why didn’t he want to let go of the research even when it meant death? Is it because he hated what spies had made him so much that he wanted to destroy their ability to lie?
Scottie [Jim Broadbent] says it at some point during the story: Alex was ashamed of the lies that he had told Danny, and I think this was his proof of true love to Danny, that he could do this, because everything up until then had been a lie — what he told him he did, where he was going, what he was doing.

I think it was his way of telling Danny how much he loved him, because he wasn’t capable of showing it any other way. He was so socially reclusive. This was his way of trying to deal with the shame of the lies that he told him. His whole life had been a lie, and it was his sort of revenge, as it were.