Battle Lines are Drawn Between Sienna Miller and Dominic West in HBO’s High-Stakes Legal and Divorce Drama WAR

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede In the early creative stages of HBO’s WAR, the feuding legal teams were referred to unofficially as the “goodies” and the “baddies.” This was news to star Dominic West, when those terms were openly utilized during a recent news conference promoting the show. “But who’s the good and the bad?” he asked, perplexed. “I didn’t realize there was a good team and a bad team.” “That means you’re on the bad team,” quipped creator, writer, and executive producer George Kay. The fact is, who the audience is cheering for may well switch back and forth over the course of WAR, which premieres Thursday, Oct. 1 on Crave. But even for those who remain as neutral as a judge, it’s a heck of a battle. WAR pits West (THE CROWN, THE AFFAIR, THE WIRE), playing a high-profile tech mogul named Morgan Henderson, against his wife Carla Duval, a successful actress played by Sienna Miller (ANATOMY OF A SCANDAL, THE LOUDEST VOICE, The Girl), in a London, England-set divorce case that takes many acrimonious twists and turns. Also fully exposed are the legal teams working relentlessly and sometimes underhandedly for their clients, with Morgan represented by an old-style firm called Cathcart and Sons, and Duval represented by a younger firm called Taylor & Byrne. “I think on-set we did fall quite comfortably into our camps, and we really shot most of this series with our respective law firms, Dom and I particularly,” Miller said. “So when we got to court, we were on opposite sides, but it was heaven, because we loved each other, and we could all hang out and be children in the green room. But it definitely felt like ‘us versus them.’” West added, “I suppose the whole process of the case is that they’re walking on this knife edge between love and war, and the lawyers are trying to push them into war.” So did West ever go so far as to feel any empathy for the other side? “No, not in the least,” he said. The impetus for the story came about in a humorously random way, according to Kay. “I was wanting to do a legal show, and I had this idea to do a show between two law firms warring with each other every season,” Kay said. “But I hadn’t really found a case to tell across Season 1. So I was in this queue and minding my own business, when the woman behind me on the phone – who was a quite affluent woman, quite put-together, and sort of a strong character – started saying the word, ‘yes’, over and over into the phone. And then finally she screamed the word, ‘YES!’, and hung up.” So what did Kay do? “I turned around, because I’m a nosy man, and I asked her what had happened,” Kay continued. “And she said, ‘the bastard signed!’ She then told me about her four-year rollercoaster divorce, and how she was so physically relieved by this news that it was finally over. I thought, ‘maybe this is the beginnings of an idea for Season 1.’” While nasty divorces are nothing new, they can take on an extra layer of animosity when there’s so much money involved, and public reputations are on the line. Neither Morgan nor Carla is necessarily a bad person in WAR, but they’re capable of doing bad things, and then digging in. “George said to me, ‘(Morgan) is a benign billionaire,’” West recalled. “And I looked into billionaires. There are two and a half thousand in the world, and three of them are good. There’s a really good podcast called Good Bad Billionaire, and they identified three good ones. They’re usually the ones who give everything away. Most of them are just ordinary billionaires. Some are the most evil people on the planet. So it was interesting to try and find the line. (Morgan) is trying to set up a social media platform that does good. He’s trying to acknowledge his wife’s minimal role in setting up the business and, you know, give her tens of millions. He’s trying to do the right thing, and so that had me rooting for him. And then George gives me an amazing, ruthless, horrible, bullying scene. It was great to play those two things.” Miller came up with a great way to describe Carla, who, as a famous actress, is used to being the centre of attention. “I think she’s someone that doesn’t particularly invest in other people’s energy in her orbit – she’s very much orbiting herself,” Miller said. “So she is very confident at the beginning. But then the gloves really come off. I think she’s wrong-footed, she’s reactive as a person, she doesn’t do well with being backed into a corner. I think I have those qualities. I think I respond in a potentially kinder way to feeling defensive, but she’s quite vicious, and I like that about her. That’s what makes for great TV.” To borrow an old expression, viewers should hope for peace, but prepare for WAR. billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv