‘War’s devious mole strategy, explained

All’s fair in love and War, including espionage.

HBO and Sky’s legal drama introduces ambitious lawyer Johnny Warren (Archie Renaux). He’s just moved back to London after working at a Manhattan law firm, and he’s on the hunt for a job in family law. However, as the first episode goes on, that job seems increasingly elusive. The firms he’s interviewing at aren’t impressed by his slick confidence or his time in New York. According to his references, his time there was far less successful than he claims it was.

Still, by the episode’s end, Johnny somehow winds up with a prime job at law firm Taylor & Byrne, helping represent actor Carla Duval (Sienna Miller) in her divorce from tech mogul Morgan Henderson (Dominic West). Unfortunately for him, he didn’t land the position on merit alone. His hiring was actually orchestrated by Morgan’s law firm, Cathcarts & Sons.

Knowing Johnny would be interviewing with Taylor & Byrne, Cathcarts offered him a job — not to work directly for them, but to be a spy within Taylor & Byrne’s team. To make sure Johnny landed the job, Cathcarts’ partner St. John Smallwood (Pip Torrens) called a friend at Johnny’s old law firm and asked them to give Taylor & Byrne a glowing recommendation. That recommendation plus Johnny’s reveal he was entertaining an offer from Cathcarts were all law partners Nicholas Taylor (James McArdle) and Serena Byrne (Phoebe Fox) needed to bring him onboard.

Johnny’s new status as a mole is bad news for Taylor & Byrne, but it could be even worse news for Johnny. If his secret gets out, he could be blackballed from the profession he claims to love so much. Why take the risk?

“Desperation is the more straightforward answer,” Renaux told Mashable in a junket interview. After all, Johnny spends the whole episode being rejected, then is made a laughingstock by his girlfriend Bella’s (Honor Swinton Byrne) posh friends.

“He’s from a sort of background of just hustling and fighting by any means possible,” Renaux continued. “‘I’m going to achieve my goals, and if it’s going to have to be this way, so be it.’ He’s moving so fast, and things happen so quickly that he hasn’t really got time to think.”

Cathcarts could also see major blowback should anyone discover their ruse. As Morgan so rightly asks his team: “Are you out of your mind?”

“If they get found out, they get struck off, basically, from the legal world,” series creator George Kay told Mashable in a junket interview. “They’ve structured it in such a way that if they get discovered, they can say, ‘Discovered about what? We know nothing about this guy.’ There’s little defense mechanisms in there.”

War‘s creative team and cast consulted with a lawyers to get a real sense of the petty infighting that goes down between firms. Did the idea of Johnny’s mole arc stem from any of those consultations?

“I don’t think it has happened in real life, but it’s the sort of idea lawyers have,” Kay said. “It’s where their mind would go, which is the real part of it.”

New episodes of War premiere Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.