Playing a couple should be no trouble for real-life husband and wife Matthew Macfadyen and Keeley Hawes... or so you’d think.
They have been married for 18 years and their relationship is the envy of the TV industry.
But they had to cast aside loyalty and devotion for the new three-part series about love cheat Labour MP John Stonehouse, who faked his own death, ran off with his mistress and was later exposed as spying for the Czechs.
Matthew, 47, plays the shamed politician, whose disappearance was huge news back in the 1970s.
Keeley, 46, plays his wife Barbara and the series is called, simply, Stonehouse.
The actress says the MP’s marriage was the polar opposite of her relationship with Matthew.
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She explains: “We have worked together before, but not for several years. And so when this came up, it seemed like the perfect project on so many levels really, mostly because the Stonehouses are so different to Matthew and I and to our relationship.
“So it’s nice to see us, I think, and interesting for people who may know that we are married to see us as the ‘other’ couple.”
Turning to Matthew, Keeley says: “It was really wonderful. It was very jolly, wasn’t it?”
Matthew then teases: “Yeah, it was very difficult working with Keeley.
“She’s... it was hard. It was hard. No, that’s a silly answer. It was joyful working with Keeley. It was nice, wasn’t it?”
Stonehouse was MP for Walsall North and a Cabinet minister under Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
He faked his death in 1974 by placing a neat pile of clothes on a beach in Miami – leaving behind wife Barbara and their children. Nobody was found but he was presumed dead and an obituary was published.
In reality, he was bound for Australia, to set up a new life with his mistress and secretary, Sheila Buckley, who he would later marry.
Matthew says: “It’s such a fascinating story. It’s so beautifully written. But it’s very sad in many ways.
“You know, he leaves his wife and kids. Everything unravelled, but it is to do with sort of proximity to power and ambition and vanity and all the rest of it.
“He had started having affairs and in our story he was moonlighting for Czech secret services and making money from that, and it all got too much for him.”
This is the third time Matthew and Keeley have worked together. They met on the set of spy drama Spooks in 2001 and starred in 2007 comedy Death at a Funeral.
The couple have been married since 2004 and have two kids.
Keeley is screen royalty thanks to hits like The Durrells and Bodyguard. And Matthew is riding high on the success of HBO drama Succession, about a powerful media family.
It means he has to select his roles carefully. He explains: “I’m not allowed to do anything like Succession because I’m sort of property of HBO. If you’re doing an ongoing series, you can do a one-off thing like this, or a play, or a film, or something.
“But it [Stonehouse] was just such a brilliant script to read when it came my way.
“And the fact it was a limited thing in three parts meant that I could get it in between seasons, it just all made sense.”
The Stonehouse mystery provided perfect material for ITV ’s upcoming drama.
Using false identities, the rogue MP set about transferring large sums between banks. Under the name of Clive Mildoon, he deposited £12,000 in cash at the Bank of New Zealand.
The teller who handled the money later spotted “Mildoon” at the Bank of New South Wales.
Stonehouse was then using the name of Joe Markham and police were alerted.
Stonehouse and Sheila spent time in Denmark before he returned to Australia, unaware he was now under surveillance.
Police initially suspected him of being Lord Lucan, the British earl who had disappeared from London – only two weeks earlier than Stonehouse vanished – following the murder of his children’s nanny.
Police in Australia noted that their suspect was reading British newspapers that included stories about Stonehouse.
They contacted Scotland Yard, requesting pictures of both Lucan and the MP.
On his arrest, the police instructed him to pull down his trousers so they could establish whether he was Lucan, who had a six-inch scar on his right thigh. Lucan was never traced.
In 1979, then Tory PM Margaret Thatcher and Cabinet members learned from a defector that Stonehouse had received about £5,000 for providing secrets to military intelligence in former Czechoslovakia.
By then Stonehouse was three years into a seven-year sentence for the fraud and it was decided there was insufficient evidence to bring him to trial.
No prosecution was brought and the spy betrayal was only revealed 20 years after he died in 1988 at the age of 62.
■ Stonehouse will be shown on free streaming service ITVX this autumn
