Hugh Bonneville & John Morton On Taking Ian Fletcher Stateside For The BBC’s ‘Twenty Twenty Six’, Securing The Signature Of American Stars And Satirizing The Soccer World Cup

EXCLUSIVE: Despite the appearance of stars like Hugh Bonneville and Chelsey Crisp, there is a certain mundanity to the set of the BBC’s Twenty Twenty Six. Even the fake Miami skyline can’t quite arrest this feeling.

That is because Deadline is checking out the follow-up to John Morton’s BAFTA-winning BBC satirical comedies Twenty Twelve and W1A, shows that have landed cult status for their excruciating ode to Britishness and in-depth examination of the behind-the-scenes machinations of public institutions. Skyline or no skyline, the success of these shows is derived, more than anything, from poking fun at bureaucracy.

Twenty Twelve spotlighted the organizing team behind the London Olympics, W1A embarked on a wonderfully meta examination of the BBC (staffers to this day talk about when the cameras turned up in the corridors of the BBC’s New Broadcasting House HQ), and Twenty Twenty Six has widened the aperture by heading Stateside to satirize those behind a soccer World Cup taking place next year.

“As we discovered with W1A and Twenty Twelve, truth is stranger than fiction,” Bonneville, who plays lead Ian Fletcher, tells us as we chat in the days after filming wraps on Twenty Twenty Six. “In the current climate, the script for Twenty Twenty Six could almost write itself. What could possibly go wrong?”

Rewind a few weeks and Deadline tours a Twenty Twenty Six set in London’s swish North Studios that is modeled on the modern, post-pandemic office. There are swivel chairs, sanitized wallpaper and plenty of inspirational quotes bedecking the walls that are unmistakenly Morton-esque. The set was built in the U.S. complete with fake Miami skyline featuring trance lights and images, and it took weeks to build before being flown to the UK. No actual filming took place in the States owing predominantly to budget and sustainability considerations, although drone footage was shot in Miami.

Bonneville’s awkward yet ever determined Ian Fletcher is the glue that holds Morton’s loose trilogy together. In Twenty Twenty Sixthe BBC’s former fictional Head of Values journeys Stateside in his new role as Director of Integrity in the Oversight Team Strategic Operations Group for the upcoming soccer tournament, which will take place in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. He is joined by American and Canadian stars new to the show including Crisp, Paulo Costanzo and Stephen Kunken, along with some older faces in the shape of Fleabag star Hugh Skinner, who returns as hapless intern Will Humphries, and narrator David Tennant.

Creator Morton comes into view immediately during our set visit standing with hands on hips, silently assessing the scene as actors run lines around a table. Two weeks later, once he’s entered the editing suite, he sits down with us to explore his process and motivations.

“I often start with an organizations’ public aspirations and then work backwards,” says Morton. “The gap between big, laudable public mission statements and the Monday morning, ‘How the hell do we do this?’ feeling. It’s in those specifics where the comedy and jeopardy lies.”

Morton found this to be “very fertile ground” for comedy when he was first plotting Twenty Twelve nearly two decades ago. “When I was younger I used to assume the people at the top knew what they were doing,” he adds. “And then you get a bit older and see how the world works and realize that the very top is just people going, ‘What the f**k do we do now?’.”

Morton’s trio of shows are relatively unique in that the time gap that’s gone between them now stretches to more than 15 years. This is partly due to Morton’s painstaking writing process, with Bonneville, who is recognized globally as Robert Crawley from Downton Abbey, jokily branding him “the slowest writer on the planet.”

“The perfect chapter for Ian Fleming”

Morton had initially flirted with the idea of ending W1A with a tease to Ian Fletcher moving to the States. While this was eventually cut, it was three or four years ago that he decided he wanted to return to Fletcher’s world. The upcoming soccer World Cup seemed the perfect place and a trip to Chicago, New York and Miami solidified this for Morton.

BBC comedy boss Jon Petrie, who commissioned Twenty Twenty Sixdescribed crossing the pond as the “perfect chapter for Ian Fleming.” “Dropping him into a Miami office full of international colleagues means the corporate doublespeak can get even more tangled,” says Petrie. “No one writes the poetry of pointless meetings quite like John Morton.”

Morton says moving Stateside will help “breathe oxygen” into the series. “The consequences of getting [the World Cup] wrong are even more catastrophic and immediate,” he adds, with barely concealed delight.

Morton acknowledges his writing process isn’t the quickest and says this is partly because of the detail he plunges into his lines of dialogue. While the final cuts appear so seamless as to almost be improvized, Deadline glances at one of his scripts and is amazed by the rigor, each line punctuated with “oohs,” “aahs” and “umms”. Scenes have to be re-shot over and over again in order to capture multiple camera angles. Morton’s editing process, which he does with a small team, is therefore arduous, taking many months.

“None of this was a strategy or plan, it’s just the way I’ve ended up writing,” adds Morton. “I think there’s a sort of rhythm to it. It’s an ensemble. Each character plays a different note, or a different noise.”

Bonneville opts for slightly more choice words. “It’s a bit like having root canal surgery,” he jokes of the filming process. “It’s lovely when it’s over. I find it almost impossible to learn the dialogue because it is so particular.”

But, in common with his character Ian Fletcher, Bonneville describes himself as an “eternal, naive optimist,” and says when Morton comes calling, “Well, we love him, and we want to ‘do it for daddy’, so we turn up again.”

North American stars

In Twenty Twenty Six, Morton needed to find a merry band of American, Canadian and Mexican thespians who could take on the challenge of his sharp-as-razor dialogue. In the end, casting director Rachel Freck located stars from interesting places, sourcing Fresh off the Boat alum Crisp to play VP Sustainability and Climate Strategy Sarah Campbell, Canadian actor Costanzo as VP Legal and Business Affairs Nick Castellano, and, intriguingly, The Handmaid’s Tale star Kunken to take on VP Logistics and Execution Owen Mitchell. Mexican star Jimena Larraguivel, meanwhile, is a revelation as VP Optics and Narrative Gabriela De La Rosa.

“Stephen was leftfield as he had super serious roles in [West End play] Kyoto and The Handmaid’s Tale, but he has this dry way of taking in what’s going on around him,” adds Morton. “Paolo and Chelsey Crisp were equally brilliant. I still can’t quite believe they came. I can’t say enough times that this can only be achieved with an incredible feat of control from the actors. I also think there is a rhythm to American English which I like and which works very well for this.”

That achievement almost becomes a “selfless act” in Twenty Twenty Six, Morton adds, because if it all comes together and “everyone does their job properly, then no one will see the job that is being done.” “Hugh [Bonneville] is incredibly selfless really because he is the captain of this ship of fools but has this ability to make something that isn’t funny just turbocharge the comedy of the moment,” adds Morton. “All you have to do is cut to his face and he gives you access to what the character must be thinking.”

During Deadline’s set visit, the cast spend several hours going over and over two scenes that poke fun at, amongst others, President Donald Trump. In one, the team is engaged in an in-depth discussion over how much screen time Trump will be given during the tournament compared to his Canadian and Mexican counterparts. Readers can imagine the chaos that ensues. The jokes take in Trump’s ego, Canada and Mexico’s place on the world stage, and the Trump-enforced global trade war.

Yet Bonneville says satirizing Trump is not an easy task. “It is beyond parody,” he adds. “You can’t really lampoon the gargantuan self-aggrandisement. It just comes across as fact.” He speaks in the weeks before the crisis over Jimmy Kimmel’s Charie Kirk monologue breaks out in the States.

Morton, who says he is “not a political man at all,” tried to “knock [politics] out of focus” in Twenty Twenty Six. “There is a political show to be written in this context but I’m not the man to write it,” he adds. “Trump and all that stuff is sort of like white noise at the back of the show, occasionally poking its way through. The focus is on the difficulty of trying to organize something like this without getting it wrong.”

Nick Lee, BBC Studios’ Commercial Director of Drama and Comedy, is tasked with selling Twenty Twenty Six abroad. Both W1A and Twenty Twelve are licensed to BritBox in the States and striking a deal with an American buyer would be a big prize. While cult British comedy has traditionally been a difficult sell, Lee says Twenty Twenty Six’s advantages lie in Bonneville’s global profile as a Downton superstar and the “very obvious marketable moment” that the show is being built around. It will likely air on the BBC in the weeks leading up to next summer’s World Cup.

“Clearly there is some specificity in the commentary in W1A but the fact the main character has history is not relevant in Twenty Twenty Six,” adds Lee. “The classic ‘fish out of water’ dynamic is what people will connect with. Whether you’re a soccer fan or not, this is a workplace sitcom.” BBC Studios, which has a minority investment stake in Twenty Twenty Six producer Expectation, will handle global sales and present the series to international buyers at MIPCOM this week in Cannes.

Once Twenty Twenty Six airs and when the drama (and most likely disappointment) of next year’s World Cup has worn off, thoughts from his devoted following of fans may turn to what Morton does next with Ian Fletcher, this most malleable of characters.

Morton says there is an “off ramp” at the end of Twenty Twenty Six that could lead nicely onto the 2028 L.A. Olympics, but he is absolutely not thinking that far ahead. “I’ll need to lie in a dark room at the end of this,” he adds. “But through all the fatigue I find myself looking around the set and thinking, ‘Christ you’re lucky to be allowed to interact with these people’.”

Bonneville’s words remain choice. “It is an exhausting, wonderful show to be a part of, and I don’t think my brain can cope with it anymore,” he says.

Watch this space.