'The Undeclared War' Star Simon Pegg and Creator Talk Predicting the Future

The Simpsons is not the only show that is able to predict the future to a scarily accurate degree, as The Undeclared War has been able to do exactly that.

Peacock's new drama is set in 2024 and follows Saara Parvin (Hannah Khalique-Brown), a university student who joins Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) for an apprenticeship as an analyst with Danny Patrick (Simon Pegg).

There, Saara is quickly drawn into an intense conflict between the U.K. and Russia when the latter hacks the other country's electoral system that GCHQ need to retaliate to, leading to a series of cyber attacks that are at risk of creating a full-scale war.

Pegg and show creator Peter Kosminsky spoke to Newsweek about the way in which the show was able to foresee events, and how "terrifying" it was to dive into the dark realities of cyber warfare.

'The Undeclared War' Star Simon Pegg and Creator Talk Predicting the Future

Although set in the near future, the show makes several accurate predictions including Prime Minister Boris Johnson being ousted from the Conservative Party, in fact the show premiered in the U.K. the very week Johnson resigned.

Kosminsky explained to Newsweek that he began working on The Undeclared War five years ago, and he wanted to center the story around a general election prompted by Johnson's exit from the Conservative Party.

"I wanted to start the show around the time of the next general election in the U.K., because, obviously, the Russians had been fiddling with American elections and there was even some suggestion that they had had some kind of involvement in our Brexit referendum," the show's creator said.

"So, I thought it'd be interesting to center the drama around an election campaign leading up to Election Day 2024, and that meant that I needed to think about what the political landscape might be like.

"I knew the Tories would still be in government, unless something catastrophic had happened to them. So the question really was will Boris Johnson still be prime minister?

"And just on balance, given the kind of guy he was, the fact that he's known to be a little bit economical with the truth, shall we say, I just took a punt and thought, actually, I think it's likely that he might have been ousted, and actually ousted from the right of his party, just given the way the world's going and the rise of populism and so forth internationally.

"What I wasn't expecting was that in the very week we launched the show he would resign, that level of synchronicity took me by surprise."

Pegg said of the prediction: "Peter's such a smart creative, and very intelligent in terms of his own political acumen and understanding how society moves and stuff, I think he was creating a kind of 'what if?' with this story, but it feels so realistic.

"I mean, it couldn't have been gone better. Thank you Boris for getting kicked out when you did."

The Mission Impossible star added: "The big thing that happened after we finished shooting was the invasion of Ukraine, which Peter was able to fold into the story in post-production, which I think he felt was a necessary thing to do, you know, and I think it only served to make the show feel more authentic.

"It's a story, I think, that really needs to be told, and I definitely feel like when I read it that I learned things about cyber warfare, and about the state of play in terms of cyber warfare, that I thought I should already know, I should be aware of this, everybody should be aware of this. So, yeah, it feels very timely."

On Russia and Cyber Warfare

The Undeclared War explores Russia's cyber warfare tactics, including the use of Twitter bots to skew public debates, and Deepfake being used to mimic an important figure to fake support for the Russian government.

Given Russia's current war on Ukraine, the subject matter of the show feels apt and Kosminsky told Newsweek a lot of his ideas stemmed from what was really happening prior to Russia's invasion.

"A lot of the research that we did in terms of what Russia's malware arsenal might look like came from some of the literally thousands of cyber attacks they had been launching on Ukraine over many years, actually almost since the development of cyber as a domain of conflict," Kosminsky said.

The creator did add, though, that he never would have predicted Russia would invade Ukraine as it has done so.

Pegg felt it was "manifest destiny" for him to appear on The Undeclared War because he grew up in "the shadow" of the real GCHQ, and had two uncles who worked there, one of whom watched the show and found it an accurate depiction of his time at the government organization.

"It was kind of simultaneously fascinating and terrifying to fully understand this new theater of war which exists in everyone's living room," Pegg said of being in the show. "The idea of cyber warfare, the idea that every major cyber player on the planet has exploits already planted in each other's cyber infrastructure.

"The fact that it's an incredibly difficult and dangerous war to navigate when it happens, because you can't always be sure who your adversary is because, you know, one adversary will make themselves look like another adversary so that you might retaliate against the wrong adversary [and] that starts another cyber war.

"Escalation is quick and it's brutal, and it's all hanging by a thread, and I feel like we're even more totally, blissfully unaware of it."

Pegg added: "It was daunting and, at the same time, I felt extremely privileged to be part of it, because I think it reminded me of a show that was on when I was a kid called Threads, which was far less melodramatic and less bleak but I think this has more in it which we can learn from.

"Just modify our behavior slightly, become slightly more aware online, slightly more careful about how we conduct ourselves online, what news sources we listen to, the people we meet online, just have a healthy caution about who they are and if they're even real."

Why 'The Undeclared War' Is Essential Viewing

Reflecting on the show's depiction of Deepfake technology being used as a weapon, Kosminsky said: "There's no doubt that a world where you could have what looks like President Biden and make him say something that's really quite dangerous, and with the world in a fragile, tinderbox state as it is at the moment, is dangerous.

"But, that's not really where my main concern lay, most of the focus was on the Russian information campaign because they group cyber attacks under the wider Head of Information Operations.

"[The attacks] appeared to be aimed at destabilizing our institutions by attacking our concept of democracy, undermining people's sense of trust in their institutions and in their elected politicians.

"And most of all, and we saw this most profoundly during the Trump administration, undermining the concept of truth in itself, what truth is.

"Well, the Russian Cyber Campaign Information Operations seems primarily designed to try to undermine the public's trust in the whole concept of truth. What is true? What is fake truth? And that worries me hugely.

"If people no longer trust the concept of truth, no longer trust their democracy, no longer trust their politicians and their institutions, what will [be the] price for civilization? So that felt, to me, like a really powerful reason to try to point a spotlight at this particular campaign that's going on under the radar."

The Undeclared War is released in full on Peacock on Thursday, August 18.

Update 08/18/22: The article was updated to include official stills from the show, and a behind-the-scenes clip of the making of the series.