Agatha Christie For The Netflix Generation? Chris Chibnall & Mia McKenna-Bruce Say ‘Seven Dials’ Evokes Sean Connery’s Bond & ‘The Crown’

How do you serve up Agatha Christie to the Netflix generation? ‘Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials’. Image: Simon Ridgway/Netflix This was the challenge laid at the foot of Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall , The Tourist director Chris Sweeney and exec Suzanne Mackie ( The Crown) , who responded with a cinematic vision, evoking the Sean Connery James Bond Era, Hitchock’s North by Northwest and the production values of The Crown , Chibnall told us. What has emerged is Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials , which stars Helena Bonham Carter , Martin Freeman and Mia McKenna-Bruce . “This was about choosing the right material in the first place and then asking what the big cinematic version of that was,” Chibnall said in advance of today’s Netflix premiere. “We weren’t going to do this quietly, we wanted to make it a visual treat for Netflix, giving it a blockbuster ‘Hitchcock Hollywood’ vibe that is a thriller but has humor and visually lavish set pieces.” Watch on Deadline Having just set up her Orchid Pictures label, Mackie tasked Chibnall with selecting a Christie book that would work for Netflix. After exploring the canon, he felt The Seven Dials Mystery had the global relevance that would suit a streamer perfectly. The book is neither a Poirot or Marple but follows amateur sleuth Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent and her efforts to uncover espionage and murder linked to a mysterious Seven Dials club in London. The novel visits several splashy locations and ripples with international conspiracy, which didn’t land so well with several critics when it was published nearly 100 years ago. The Times Literary Supplement said at the time that Christie had “deserted the methodical procedure of inquiry into a single and circumscribed crime for the romance of universal conspiracy and international rogues.” Chibnall, on the other hand, thinks Christie was simply ahead of her time. “You could argue in 1929 she was writing a modern, cinematic script and it was the people reviewing it who were behind the times,” he added. “From the start this was very clearly a conversation about what Agatha Christie is for the streaming era. We didn’t want to replicate what other [networks] have done so well and so definitively.” McKenna-Bruce, a BAFTA Rising Star who broke out in Molly Manning Walker’s hit indie pic How to Have Sex, said she “fell in love with Bundle, and Chris’s scripts, immediately.” “I’ve always liked the adaptations but had never read an Agatha Christie book,” she added. “I always feel quite intimidated by [adaptations] but having read Seven Dials the thing that stands out most is just how funny it is and how it feels.” Bundle is a plucky character who gives off the vibe that she can take on anything but McKenna-Bruce said she was mainly drawn to her ability to connect with people. “You can see that immediately in the series,” she added. “I love people and that’s why I love acting and I saw that with her and wanted to run...

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