Anna Kendrick’s new action thriller lands its streaming home

If you still think of Anna Kendrick as the chirpy star of Pitch Perfect, it might be time for a rethink. These days she’s pretty much everywhere: in front of the camera, behind it, and now, firmly planted in the centre of the streaming wars. Let’s get into her latest – and MGM+’s latest grab for relevance – Embassy.

After all the festival noise around her directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, and buzzy headlines about her return to Netflix for The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Kendrick’s career has been in what sports people call 'momentum'. Between that and the promise of her starring opposite Chris Rock for A24’s Misty Green (not to mention a Seth Rogen comedy, Babies, still on the way), she’s in more pipelines than Thames Water. But Embassy is her big step into TV, and it’s cleared its final hurdle: someone has actually bought the thing.

MGM+ has officially picked up Embassy, a contained siege thriller starring Anna Kendrick, Sam Heughan, and J.K. Simmons.

MGM+ Steps In

The series is internationally financed and, frankly, a bit of a coup for MGM+, Amazon’s quietly desperate answer to ‘prestige’ streaming. There's no premiere date, so anyone plotting out their autumn telly is out of luck for now, but at least we know where to eventually find it.

Kendrick is front and centre as Layla, the unlucky American staffer working in the US embassy in London when a group of gunmen take over the building. Now, this isn’t just about who’ll survive the next gunshot: the draw here is watching Layla play tug-of-war between following orders from the ambassador (Simmons), and getting sucked into a side mission entirely. Cue the arrival of her almost-ex-fiancé, played by Heughan (he of Outlander stardom), whose conveniently specialised military skill set is exactly what the siege requires – because of course it is. It’s a vieux jeu trope, but if eight seasons of Outlander proved anything, it’s that Heughan can wring all sorts of subtext from messy exes and tight situations.

The show’s not shy about its format: six parts, one building, one day, maximum pressure. Whether it can keep the tension up for the whole run is the real challenge. Just for reference, John Strickland’s directing – he’s the bloke behind Bodyguard, which did the same single-threat shuffle awfully well, so there are reasons to be optimistic the whole thing won’t collapse halfway through episode three.

Behind the Curtain

There’s an interesting bit of business in how Embassy actually got here. This announcement comes about nine months after AGC Television (Stuart Ford’s outfit) launched the project to buyers at Mipcom. And they haven’t been hanging about: production is already wrapped, shot on location in Cologne and London across all six episodes.

Filming is complete, so there shouldn't be any holdups from that end – we're waiting on MGM+ to pick the right slot in their release calendar.

If MGMP+ seems a little keen, it’s no wonder: they’re in the middle of reinventing themselves as the elder sibling of streaming, aiming for 'adult-skewing genre fare' (their phrase). Snagging a high-wattage cast led by Kendrick is just what the PR ordered. The service’s global boss Michael Wright called it "a high-octane six-part thriller" and seemed genuinely chuffed to put it alongside their other grown-up dramas.

So, Embassy has got its streaming home, filming’s in the can, and the only hitch is how long MGM+ keep it on the shelf before unleashing another round of close-quarters chaos on all of us.