Behind the scenes of the English Call My Agent!: ‘How do we not mess this up?’

When John Morton was asked by Amazon to create an English version of Call My Agent!, his first thought, he tells me, was: “My God. How do we not mess this up?”

Set in a Parisian talent agency, the comedy first aired in France in 2015 (under the title Dix Pour Cent) but became a cult hit with British viewers after Netflix picked up the first three series during the 2020 lockdown. Featuring guest appearances from real-life stars gamely playing overblown versions of themselves as the agency’s famous clients – among them Juliette Binoche, Monica Bellucci and Sigourney Weaver – it combined the promise of a peek behind the celebrity curtain with the train-wreck thrill of watching as the increasingly strung-out agents, including Andréa (Camille Cottin) and Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert), struggle to juggle the demands of their own messy lives with those of their high-maintenance charges.

“I was already a big fan, as a punter, as it were,” says Morton, the creator of such tack-sharp sitcoms as the London Olympics-themed Twenty Twelve and the BBC management satire W1A. “But it was a huge responsibility.” Nevertheless, for a writer with Morton’s knack for exposing the holes people dig for themselves by being economical with the truth, the premise of a sitcom set in an agency proved irresistible. “I’ve got a really brilliant agent,” he says, “but I know that when she talks to me she doesn’t say quite what she just said to the producers. And she won’t say to the producer quite what I’ve just said with her.

“They do care about their clients and they do care about the industry,” he clarifies. “But they’re trying to do their best for both sets of people. They are having to navigate a very, very narrow ledge between falsehood and truth to get to a good place. Intellectually and dramatically, it’s a really interesting world to think about.”

Jack Davenport, who plays Jonathan – the English equivalent of senior partner Mathias in the original series – tells me: “I actually said to my agent at one point, ‘So, about… lying.’ And he said, ‘You can’t do it, because if you get caught, you’re dead.’ But then he talked about ‘information management’… If ever there was a profession that dealt in shades of grey it would be theatrical agents.”

“It is a very personal relationship,” adds Lydia Leonard, who steps into Camille Cottin’s shoes as the driven, borderline obsessive agent, Rebecca. “It sort of crosses the line between friend, parent, mentor and occasional therapist. I started with my agent when I was 23, so it’s been one of the longest relationships in my life.”

Before he even began work on the new series, Morton – who writes and directs Ten Percent (as the new show is known) – stopped himself from watching any more of the original Call My Agent! and still hasn’t seen the most recent, fourth season. “I made a deliberate decision not to have it in my head all the time with me, because I needed to find a different centre of gravity,” he says. “Anyone that’s watched the French show will recognise the templates of those characters, but our show has also got to work out of the box, fresh, for people who’ve never seen it.”

Certainly he wasn’t afraid to make some significant changes. In Morton’s version, the agency’s longtime boss (played by Jim Broadbent), who passes on the reins early on, is also Jonathan’s father, adding an extra twist to the company’s internal dynamics. Morton also introduces the character of Simon Gould (Tim McInnerny), an old-school thesp who has fallen on hard times. He seems to spend most of his waking hours either in the agency’s foyer or in the pub, waiting in vain for some good news.

“Simon’s not the best client,” says McInnerny, “and he’s an alcoholic. But he’s possibly the nicest person that I’ve ever played. I’ve known John Morton for a long time so the creation of this character is maybe slightly disturbing in terms of what it says he thinks of me.”

He is grateful, though, that the character is no mere parody “luvvie”. “It’s one of the things that has always annoyed me for well… my whole career,” says McInnerny. “The vast majority of the time actors are presented on television as ridiculous, two-dimensional, flamboyant figures instead of as human beings who have the same problems as everybody else.”

One feature that Morton does retain from the original series is the celebrity cameos. Helena Bonham Carter, Kelly Macdonald, Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor, The Crown’s Emma Corrin, David Oyelowo, Dominic West and David Harewood all appear in the first series alone. In an early episode, Davenport’s agent finds himself representing Olivia Williams who comes to his office for a crunch meeting.

“I’ve known Olivia since 1995,” says Davenport. We started to do these scenes and I said, ‘This is very weird, because you’re you… but I’m not me.’ There was a slight telescope-the-wrong-way round kind of thing. I didn’t know what was going on.”

On the set of Ten Percent, in Twickenham, I watch a scene being filmed in the agency’s offices. A huge photograph of a Soho street hangs behind the windows of a meeting room in which Lydia Leonard, Jack Davenport and their characters’ assistants are gathered around a conference-call speaker, trying to find what has become of David Harewood, who has gone Awol when he is supposed to be at a major audition.

The atmosphere is frenetic and the dialogue quick-fire. True to every Morton script, no one is really listening to what anyone else is saying. On each consecutive take, Morton demands more urgency. “Can you do this one as if you’re the only grown-up in the room?” he asks Davenport. “Think military, with some well-meaning but incompetent juniors.”

Later, Leonard tells me that working with Morton – who was an English teacher before moving into television – “is very unlike working with anyone else. He’s got the manner of your favourite school teacher. He gives very few notes other than, ‘Go faster!’ really, most of the time. He likes it very, very quick and snappy. And then he’ll maybe add one word or pare one back – but he’s always absolutely right. It just works better, faster.”

And that is where the British version of Call My Agent! – make sure to call it Ten Percent – will stand or fall. In its tempo, its idiom, its vernacular; ultimately in its Britishness.

“One of the key differences between Britain and France,” says Morton, “is that in British life – and as a writer, this is where I operate really – in its cultural life, political life, the entertainment life and even social life really, it’s often about what’s not being said or done. It’s never on the surface.”

‘Ten Percent’ is on Prime Video from April 28. All four series of ‘Call My Agent!’ are now available on Netflix