David Tennant may be on his way back to screens next year as The Doctor, but before that, he’s starring in brand new ITV drama Litvinenko. The show, which is helping to launch the company’s new streaming service ITVX (which replaces ITV Hub), and is set to begin on 15th December. It tells the true story of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who in 2006 was poisoned in London, dying a few weeks later.
Tennant plays the role of the former spy, who became a prominent critic of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government and fled to the United Kingdom in the early 2000s. In late 2006, he fell ill after meeting two Russian ex-KGB officers in the Millennium Hotel in London, and died a couple of weeks later- he had been poisoned with radioactive polonium. The incident was one of the first significant wedges between the West and Russia since the Cold War, and the ITV drama tells the story of both the investigation and the efforts of his wife Marina Litvinenko, and others to prove who was behind his death since the Putin government denied any involvement.
Marina Litvinenko in the series is played by Margarita Levieva (The Lincoln Lawyer, Adventureland), with the two officers investigating the poisoning claims played by Neil Maskell and Barry Sloane. The drama is 4 parts long, beginning with the two officers interviewing Litvinenko about his claim that he had been poisoned, and continues with the 10-year investigation into how he died and who was behind it- with the spy pointing the blame at Putin himself. The first image released for the series sees Tennant recreating the now infamous image of Litvinenko lying in hospital just before his death- with a trailer featuring similar shots of him as he tells his story.
Litvinenko will release on 15th December on ITVX and on the ITV channel.
For more on the latest in entertainment, click here for our December streaming guide.
The series was in development before the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, and it now finds itself with new relevance. Tennant himself said that “it’s so relevant to the world we live in what happened to that man and the things that he spent his life talking about and that his wife Marina, who is an extraordinary human, is still doing.” Tennant is now the only big-name star telling the story of the poisoned spy: Benedict Cumberbatch is also set to play Litvinenko in the HBO series Londongrad that’s still in development- but for now ITV’s version of events is set to release on 15th December. All 4 episodes will be able to watch on ITVX on the same day, and will also later air on ITV’s main channel in 2023.