In a London hotel room, Dominic West is weighing up how much he would accept to strip to his socks. In the new series War, West plays a social media billionaire who is supposed to be fairly decent, though there’s one excruciating scene – goading someone to strip for money – that reveals he’s definitely also a bit of a git. He wonders what his price would be.
His co-star Sienna Miller laughs and says he’d do it “for the lols”, and West grins and says: “No, I’d want three figures. A hundred quid.” War is a juicy eight-part legal drama, where Miller and West are a divorcing couple – she a narcissistic film star, he said billionaire – so just about all their scenes together are suppurating with contempt, which is fun, but also a bit of a shame because they have such good chemistry. They first worked together 21 years ago in the West End production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
There have been many times she’s gone into jobs where “on the first day you’re married to someone and you don’t know them. It’s helpful to have some sort of rapport.” West was cast first – he had worked with the creator George Kay previously on the classy BBC drama The Hour, and Kay had written the role of Morgan Henderson, a tech entrepreneur, with him in mind. Miller plays Carla Duval, a Hollywood star who wants half of her philandering ex’s wealth – with the help of her formidable legal team.
Neither Carla nor Morgan have much to recommend them. Miller struggled, she says with a laugh, to “find the more human aspects of her, until I realised it was really fun not to. I decided to have fun leaning into the unappealing qualities of Carla, which was quite uncomfortable for somebody who errs on the side of people-pleasing.
To not be invested in other people’s reactions or responses. To be narcissistic, basically.” For West, it must have been just as tricky finding his way into playing a “benign billionaire”. The BBC podcast Good Bad Billionaire came in useful, he says.
Only a handful of the billionaires covered could be considered “good”. But other than that, I was doing what Sienna was avoiding, and I do all the time, which is desperately try to make people like me.” Was the high-profile divorce based on real-life cases? No, says Kay when we speak.
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