The Courier Trivia | 30 facts about the new film

“The Courier” is a new spy film starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The movie is based on a true story.

Let’s find out more about it!

1. The Courier is a 2020 historical spy film.
2. It was directed by Dominic Cooke.
3. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne.
4. He portrays a British businessman who was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service to deliver messages to secret agent Oleg Penkovsky (played by Merab Ninidze) in the 1960s. Rachel Brosnahan, Jessie Buckley, and Angus Wright also star.
5. The Courier had its world premiere under its original title Ironbark.
6. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 24 January 2020.
7. It was released in the United States on 19 March 2021.
8. It is scheduled to be released in the United Kingdom on 13 August 2021.
9. The film received generally favorable reviews from critics.
10. On 1 May 2018, it was announced that FilmNation Entertainment was producing Ironbark, a film about British spy Greville Wynne from a script by Tom O’Connor.
11. Dominic Cooke was set to direct the film and produce alongside O’Connor, Ben Pugh, Rory Aitken, Adam Ackland, Josh Varney, and Leah Clarke.
12. Production companies involved with the film include SunnyMarch.
13. Alongside the initial production announcement, it was confirmed that Benedict Cumberbatch had been cast as Greville Wynne.
14. In October 2018, it was announced that Rachel Brosnahan, Jessie Buckley, Merab Ninidze, Angus Wright, and Kirill Pirogov had joined the cast of the film.
15. Principal photography for the film commenced in London on 15 October 2018.
16. It lasted until 7 December 2018.
17. Abel Korzeniowski composed the score and Lakeshore Records released the soundtrack on March 19, 2021.
18. Track listing and credits adapted from Soundtrack.Net.
19. Screenwriter Tom O’Connor found out as much as he could about Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky. Their relationship is mentioned in several books but only in fragments.
20. Early in the film, characters mention a CIA’s failure with a spy named Popov. They are talking about Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, a Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) who operated with the CIA during World War II and later became a double agent while stationed in Vienna. Popov provided some valuable counter intelligence information, warning the CIA on the Soviet infiltration on the U-2 spy plane project. Eventually, the Soviet authorities suspected and dismissed him from the GRU in 1958, finally arresting Popov in 1959.
21. By the time the movie begins, on August 1960, Popov had been executed on January the same year. Interestingly, a Serbian spy with the same name, Dusko Popov, served as a double agent for MI6 during World War II, and is believed to have inspired the character of James Bond.
22. This film opened in a number of markets and territories in 2021 on Greville Wynne’s birthday of 19th March. He was born in 1919 and passed away on 29th February 1990.
23. Greville Wynne wrote an autobiography which was first published in 1967. It was entitled ‘The Man From Moscow: The Story of Wynne and Penkovsky’.
24. However, screenwriter Tom O’Connor was aware that the reliability of this book had been questioned. O’Connor said: “I read a few people who did a point-by-point discrediting of the things that Wynne claimed happened arguing that they couldn’t possibly be real.
25. Benedict Cumberbatch’s third film concerning British intelligence, and the second of those films to be set during the Cold War.
26. This is the second time actor Vladimir Chuprikov has played Nikita Khrushchev in a film, the First Being in Gagarin, First in Space (2013).
27. Oleg wanted to defect from the Soviet Union to the United States and live as a cowboy in Montana. Sam Neill’s character Borodin, in The Hunt for Red October (1990) was also defecting to the United States to live in Montana as a cowboy.
28. This film has many similarities to a James Bond film, and has been publicized as such – most notably in its television advertising and film reviews. That said, the first scene in which the audience is introduced to the main protagonist, Greville Wynne (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), was shot at Stoke Park – the same golf course that was used in the filming of the James Bond movie, Goldfinger (1964).
29. On 16th October 1962, President John F. Kennedy was handed high-altitude photographs taken from U-2 planes flying over Cuba that showed Soviet soldiers setting up nuclear-armed missiles on the island. The United States had been tipped-off that the Soviet Union was putting nuclear warheads on the Caribbean Island. The Cuban Missile Crisis saw the world on the brink of nuclear war.
30. With the director Dominic Cooke and leading man Benedict Cumberbatch signed, producer Ben Pugh was ready to move production onto the next phase. Pugh said: “With UTA’s help, we all sent the script to FilmNation. They’re the premier financier in this space in terms of these sorts of movies, and they joined as financiers and producers. It became a very amazing team with those three companies: 42, SunnyMarch and FilmNation.”