Olivia Colman and Susan Sarandon join the cast of Channel 4's new drama Army of Shadows

Starring alongside Paddy Considine, America Ferrera, Alex Hassell and Kit Harington!

Channel 4 has today announced that Susan Sarandon and Olivia Colman have joined the cast of Ronan Bennett’s highly anticipated new series Army of Shadows, joining previously announced Paddy Considine, America Ferrera, Alex Hassell and Kit Harington

Also joining the ensemble cast are Leila Farzad, Luther Ford, Amara Okereke, Patrick O’Kane, Anjli Mohindra, Ed Ashley and Zoë Telford.

The six-part drama, which has been inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 film and Joseph Kessel’s seminal book of the same name, which famously dramatised the emergence of the French Resistance to the Nazi Occupation of France during World War 2.

Army of Shadows promises to be a bold new story from Ronan Bennett of how resistance takes shape in an occupied Great Britain, and has been developed and produced with the support of the Melville family and the Kessel estate, which is controlled by the Irish Red Cross.

Britain looks almost normal, but the flags are different, the news is careful, and nobody says certain things out loud anymore. But everyone can feel it. Somewhere beneath the surface of ordinary life something has gone terribly, quietly wrong.

Out of the shadows emerges a former soldier known only as Berry, who starts building a secret resistance network. He knows one thing above all else: don't act before you're ready. An unlikely group starts to coalesce around him, people who've decided they can't look away any longer: a soldier, a student, a radiographer, a journalist. Ordinary people, with ordinary lives, making an extraordinary and irreversible choice.

Against them: a state with unlimited reach, a ruthless minister who'll do whatever it takes to maintain “order”, and an American intelligence operative called Jessie, who is very, very good at her job. Army of Shadows is a tense, propulsive thriller about what resistance actually costs. If your country were occupied, what would you do?

Co-produced by STUDIOCANAL and Two Cities Television, which is part of STV Studios, Army of Shadows is written by Ronan Bennett, directed by Lisa Gunning, series produced by Alison Sterling and executive produced by Paul Gilbert and M-K Kennedy for STUDIOCANAL Television; Ron Halpern and Joe Naftalin for STUDIOCANAL, with Stephen Wright and Michael Jackson for Two Cities Television alongside Ronan Bennett.

Army of Shadows will air on Channel 4