Netflix dropped their first trailer for the upcoming The Spy limited series, starring Sacha Baron Cohen getting more dramatic than you’ve ever seen him before. The Borat leading man stars as real-life Mossad agent Eli Cohen, who went undercover in Syria in the 1960s. He infiltrated the military and wealthy circles to gain trust on Syria’s anti-Israel secret initiatives, and as these few minutes show, Cohen’s double identity threatens to swallow him whole as a years-long mission grows deeper than intended.
Soon enough, Cohen (as Cohen) is not only lying to world leaders and his wife but himself, and the generally comedic actor seems to take quite a turn here, if the trailer is any indication. Gideon Raff (Prisoners of War, Homeland) directs The Spy, set in the 1960s when Cohen’s clerk takes on the secret-agent lifestyle while hoping to serve his country without paying the ultimate price. If this series adheres to real-life events (and there’s been no indication that it will not), Cohen will succeed in changing the course of Israel’s history.
The cast includes Noah Emmerich (The Americans) as Cohen’s Mossad handler; Hadar Ratzon Rotem (Homeland) as Cohen’s wife, who has plenty of suspicions of her own about her husband’s job; and Waleed Zuaiter (Colony) as Amin Al-Hafz, a military officer who gets more than he bargained for from apparent ally Cohen. The “more than he bargained for” certainly appears to be a universal theme in this series.
All six episodes of The Spy will drop on September 6. Here’s a poster.
