Back In The (Spy) Game: Richard Armitage Talks ‘Berlin Station’

by Brittany Frederick


Richard Armitage is returning to espionage as the star of Epix’s new original series ‘Berlin Station.’ Hidden Remote spoke to him to get a few clues.


Richard Armitage is used to the call of duty. He portrayed ambiguous super-spy Lucas North in three series of Spooks and tough as nails soldier John Porter in the first run of Strike Back. Now the talented actor is answering the call again as Daniel Miller in Epix’s Berlin Station.

But Daniel Miller isn’t like Richard’s previous heroes. His story begins when he’s yanked out from behind a desk at CIA headquarters at Langley, and he’s then sent across the ocean to Berlin to find a mole in a world where everyone knows more than he does. Is he going to rise to the challenge or get himself killed?

That difference in character – and the show’s overall approach to the spy game – is what drew the actor to the project in the first place.

“I wanted to find something thrilling, political, relevant,” he told us in a phone interview, “but that at the same time had an air of mystery about it, where it looks at times like it’s going to be action-based. And it fit in a genre which I personally love to read and watch; I’m a big John Le Carre fan.

“Berlin Station was promising, to move away from technology and moving to a more human interaction type of place,” he added. “And for that, the idea of working on a character that was going to psychologically profile his opponent was really something that appealed to me.”

Daniel Miller isn’t the kind of spy who has all the nifty James Bond-ian gadgets at his disposal; this is a man who not only doesn’t have the experience but also isn’t relying on those elements TV fans have come to rely on in the genre. He’s going to get his hands dirty and use his head, and that’s what makes him dynamic. This is a character who truly earns his victories, and Richard is enthralling as he takes us through every move he makes.

SPOILER ALERT: The remainder of this interview contains information about the first season of Berlin Station.

While fans will want to compare Daniel to Lucas North, the actor told us that there’s no similarity between the two.

“He is different,” he explained. “He doesn’t have the same kind of skill set. He doesn’t have a military background, although his father was in military intelligence. He doesn’t have any extraordinary physical attributes. He is an analyst but he’s more of a cerebral character. He’s not a genius or anything.

“He’s a regular ordinary guy who is sort of thrown into a extraordinary circumstance and actually has to become the person that he’s aspiring to be through the things that are thrown in his path.”

And unlike many other spies Daniel’s own personality and history, particularly a tragic loss in his family, become assets in how he plays the game.

“The reason the death of his mother is there in the story is to say here is someone who is not just a machine, someone that puts his own emotion and personality aside,” Richard added. “He uses it to find out what he needs to know.”

It’s that intersection between the person and the mission that Richard Armitage particularly relishes about Berlin Station. “The last time I tackled the genre I occasionally got frustrated,” he told us, “because we’re playing people that really kind of put the personality aside and that were blank canvases and had no emotional response to things, because of course they have to play their game with a poker face on the whole time.

“With this experience it was much more about bringing all of those things as a tool,” he continued. “The idea of empathy and not shutting down one’s feelings but extending [them] into the opponent, friend or foe to sort of get under their skin and figure out who they are. It’s actually a much more dangerous act because you risk losing yourself in the other person, and you’ll see the relationship between Daniel and Hector go into exactly that territory.”

Hector is the CIA case officer played by Rhys Ifans (Elementary, The Amazing Spider-Man) and it’s the link between him and Daniel that stands out to Richard.

“There’s a very fascinating relationship between Daniel and Hector. They have history,” he teased. “We’re going to explore that in Episode 4, I think it is. There’s a whole flashback episode, that they are kind of melded by what happened to them in Chechnya. It really shows the course of events and they become friend and foe in the same plotline.

“He’s the one person that Daniel knows intimately, can understand and can really kind of analyze and vice versa, so that becomes a fascinating relationship.”

As with all good spy thrillers, everyone that happens in Daniel’s way in Berlin Station should be considered a potential threat.

“Everyone’s under suspicion and he really has everybody under the microscope and they don’t know that he’s doing it till right at the end of the season,” Richard said, adding that the uncertainty also extends to his own character.

“Nobody really knows who Daniel is,” he teased. “He’s a bit of a enigma, because the file on him says he’s been behind a desk for ten years but we see him in Panama working in finance so we know what’s in his file isn’t true. So there’s a lot more to Daniel than the CIA knows and the CIA has been told, and he’s already undercover so it’s going to unravel.”

Daniel may not have a lot of experience in the world he’s going to get into, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t experienced in something. So who’s really playing who? And as people continue to deceive and manipulate one another, who will be able to keep it all together? Even the actors weren’t in on the truth as Berlin Station‘s story developed while it unfolded.

“There’s a speech in Episode 2 where you find out all about Daniel’s history,” Richard said, “but there were other things along the way that he started to need and picked up so we added them to the biography.

“But I went through most of the series thinking that he really was behind a desk for ten years, and it wasn’t until the end that we decided that he had been up to more things than that. And I loved it. I loved the fact that the investment in his own narrative is up.”

Berlin Station is a chess match, not a fist fight, and one of the things the show does particularly well is teach us not to assume anything down to some of the most basic facts. If audiences take something away from watching Daniel’s journey, Richard hopes it’s to give a second look at what’s presented to us as the truth.

“We’ve yielded everything to technology without really questioning the frailty and security of it,” he reflected. “I think it’s something we really need to take onboard for ourselves, is not really sorting out the truth.

“Especially watching the current political cycle, there’s the idea that if you just repeat something enough times that it will become the truth and it’s not. I feel we have to strive for that and I think that’s something I’m passionate about.”

It all makes sense now why Richard Armitage was drawn to Berlin Station, and why Berlin Station needs Richard Armitage. The series is stripping away the conventions of the modern spy thriller and taking it back to what’s most compelling – the mental and emotional warfare between people who could even be lying to themselves.

And if you’ve seen even a fraction of the Richard Armitage catalog, you know that’s a grey area that he thrives in. He is an expert at taking characters who aren’t clear and actually doing something with that ambiguity to make them effective – drawing them sharply in spite of, and sometimes because of, what we don’t know about them.

Berlin Station only works if the viewer can be as uncertain as Daniel Miller and yet as invested in him as possible, and for that mission there’s no better actor than Richard Armitage.

So there’s a lot more to Daniel than the CIA knows and the CIA has been told, and he’s already undercover so it’s going to unravel.

Richard Armitage ‏@RCArmitage

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.@BerlinStation @EpixHD Deception, self deception and the desperate hunt for the truth...does this ring a bell with anyone? #USElection2016