David Farnor | On 25, Aug 2025

When is a BBC drama not a BBC drama? When it bags French national treasure Julie Delpy as co-star. That’s the curious star double-bill appeal of Hostage, Netflix’s latest thriller – a series that casts Delpy as French president Vivienne Toussaint and our own national treasure Suranne Jones as UK PM Abigail Dalton. The series begins as the two leads meet for a conference to solve a migration crisis – only for the whole thing to be upended by an even more pressing hostage crisis.

The hostage in question? Alex (Ashley Thomas), Abigail’s husband and a member of Doctors Without Borders, who is kidnapped while working in French Guiana. Soon enough an ultimatum emerges: Abigail must resign within 24 hours, or Alex is killed. It’s only a matter of time until the news leaks, but also only a matter of time until everyone around Abigail has a different opinion on what she should do: her slightly wayward daughter, Sylvie (Isobel Akuwudike), thinks her mum is being selfish by not immediately resigning, and her dying father, Max (James Cosmo), thinks that she risks alienating Sylvie forever if she doesn’t get Alex home safely. Meanwhile, her chief of staff, Kofi (the always mesmerising Lucian Msamati), is planning to leave himself if she doesn’t take his advice.

In other words, Abigail’s got a lot going on. But Hostage’s success lies in its ability to keep her front and centre and still give room for an equally fascinating web of pressures and expectations around her French counterpart. Vivienne is an icy but not unkind politician, but finds herself under threat too from an anonymous blackmailer – a threat that tears through her own web of personal relationships, including her left-leaning stepson, Matheo (Corey Mylchreest), who doesn’t like her shift into the right wing of politics, Matheo’s new girlfriend, Saskia (Sophie Robertson), who wants Vivienne to approve of her, and her friendly right-hand woman, Adrienne (Jehnny Beth), who seems to have nailed the impossible feat of being in all the right places at all the right times. Oh, and there’s Vivienne’s media mogul husband (Vincent Perez) waiting in the wings claiming to support her but mostly wanting to control the family optics.

The result is a thrilling portrait of two female leaders in unique but similar situations, and they’re a dynamite double-act. Julie Delpy is pitch-perfect as the frosty, ruthless and forthright ruler, who knows what she has to do to get ahead in the polls – but also is self-aware to know that doing so involves a moral compromise. And Suranne Jones is as magnetic as you’d expect, balancing vulnerability and resilience from one second to the next, while facing a string of impossible choices.

Screenwriter Matt Charman (Bridge of Spies) repeatedly brings both women back to the central question of whether to put their personal lives or their political futures first. While Delpy’s formidable supporting turn highlights Netflix’s international clout and widens the scope into something richer than a more contained drama might have been, there’s no doubting that Suranne Jones is the heart of the thriller.

The five episodes drill further and further down on her dilemma, giving the uniformly cast around her opportunities to tease out debates around public funding, fading trust in politics, the importance of compromise and cooperation, the value of integrity and – fuelling Martin McCann’s intense villain – the unseen human impact of every difficult decision made by someone in power. The result is a rollicking thriller that barrels along at breakneck speed, but Charman’s laser-focused script elevates this from a pulpy, twist-driven drama to a character-driven nail-biter, as every title card – superimposed over Abigail in giant, red letters – reminds us that being a PM involves being a hostage in more ways than one.

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