How 10 Percent Puts a British Twist on Call My Agent!

Britain and France are separated by little more than 28 miles, but if you asked Jack Davenport, he’d say the countries are worlds apart.

So when he and Lydia Leonard were cast in 10 Percent, Sundance and AMC+’s remake of the French series Call My Agent!, it wasn’t all that difficult to put their own twist on the show. As Davenport told E! News, the Brits are “a strange, emotionally-constipated island of people and a lot of what we don’t say is the important part or we mean the opposite of what we say, which is not really the French way of doing things.”

These differences become painfully obvious as viewers meet the agents of Nightingale Hart, a talent agency located in the heart of London. The group represents a myriad of famous English actors, including the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Phoebe Dynevor and Dominic West. But they face a major setback when founder Richard Nightingale (Jim Broadbent) suddenly dies, leaving his son, Jonathan (Davenport), and the rest of the agents to pick up the pieces. 

While the French version of the show sees the characters move on from their founder’s death as if there’s nothing else they can do, Richard’s passing truly shakes up the Nightingale Hart staff, especially Jonathan, who feels that he’s his father’s rightful replacement. 10 Percent writer John Morton felt compelled to add this familial element, explaining to E! News in a separate interview, “I wanted to find a way of really making the loss of the founder of the of the company matter.”