New thriller Honey reveals how a Cold War love triangle turned a novice spy into an icy MI6 boss

As the enigmatic and sharp-tongued head of the Russia desk at MI6 in Killing Eve, Carolyn Martens stole pretty much every scene she was in. Now she's back – or at least a younger version of her is – in the brilliant new dark comedy Honey, a sort of Killing Eve prequel that tells Carolyn's story.

Played by Fiona Shaw in the original show, Carolyn – or Martha as she's called when we meet her in 1982 – is now played by Ann Skelly, best known for sci-fi drama The Nevers, as a frustrated spy embedded deep in Cold War East Berlin. 

She wants to do the real work of catching the bad guys but her bosses want her to stick to what she's good at: being a honeytrap to entice men into giving away their secrets.

'We meet her as a baby spy,' says Emma Moran, who has written the series. 'I didn't want her character to be exactly the same as Fiona's. This is a younger version, way less polished. She's a young woman trying to forge a career in a very male-dominated field. She's very driven but not very good, she's still figuring stuff out.'

But she also becomes an unlikely romcom heroine when she finds herself drawn to two very different men – one on either side of the Iron Curtain.

First she meets handsome CIA spy Kurt Fischer (Nate Mann), but when she messes up a meeting for him the two are tasked with working together for the benefit of the West. 

Then she's hauled in front of the German secret police, the Stasi, because they think she's having an affair with her British diplomat handler Graham Anderson (Rory Kinnear). There she meets handsome Stasi officer and committed Communist Friedrich Bauman (Jannis Niewöhner), and the chemistry between them is electric.

'Martha starts off really drawn to Kurt,' says Irish actress Ann. 'He's a player in the game she wants to be involved in. But then they're pushed together and start to resent each other because both prefer to work independently. With Friedrich she's drawn to the idea that he's a superstar in counter-espionage and she loves the forbiddenness of that.'

Writer Emma spent time at the re-created Stasi prison in Berlin for research, and the six-part series features comedy elements of Cold War spycraft while also trying to capture what it was like living in a repressive state.  

'The Stasi prison has been re-created so it feels like they've just put their pens down to get a coffee – it was quite creepy,' says Emma.

'The head honcho had a big bust of Karl Marx in the corner, but there was also the little room where people would make tea and sandwiches. I wanted an element of office politics in the series because I didn't want textbook baddies. 

'We had a lot of propaganda during the Cold War about how awful everything was behind the Iron Curtain, but I wanted to show that there were people who genuinely believed in the project.'

She was also inspired by a book about Stasi spycraft – from cameras on cats' collars to elaborate prosthetics and costumes. 'I don't want to spoil it too much but in the first 20 minutes of the show we use a disguise that was genuinely used to get someone out of Moscow, and on paper it's totally ridiculous,' she says. 

'The Russians were good at honeytraps. I loved the idea of cigarette-packet cameras, and they even had elaborate lacy bras with cameras in them.'

Ann laughs when she talks about her first scene, in which she wears an extraordinary curly red wig and prosthetic nose. 'I was with Nate and I spent a lot of time wearing this Muppety wig, which made me quite Muppety in how I acted. Our director told me to stop bouncing around too much, as the Muppet spirit had taken over me.'

The series was filmed in Lithuania as it was enduring one of its worst winters in more than a decade, with thick snow on the ground and temperatures frequently falling to -15C. Because the country was behind the Iron Curtain in the 80s, some of the crew remembered this period.

'We had a great production designer who was like an encyclopaedia of the era, so if I wrote a banana into a scene he'd say, 'We didn't have those,' says Emma.

'It was fascinating to hear people's memories. Some people would shrug and say, 'It wasn't that bad, I had a cheap apartment and there were no homeless people.'

There are hopes that if the series does well it will continue, and we may see Martha turning more and more into Carolyn. 

'I've given her a backstory where her dad was quite high up in MI5 before he died and she's trying to prove herself,' says Emma. 'What we see is that tension of how much she's willing to do to get ahead, because it's a job where you have to do horrible things to nice people.'

Honey starts on Saturday November 14 at 9pm on BBC1 and BBC iPlayer.