Game of Thrones Star Alfie Allen Says Atomic Will Mess With Your Head

Alfie Allen is back in the danger zone, and this time he is moving more than feelings. Sky Atlantic has a new five-part thriller called Atomic, and the pitch is basically: what if your next job involved smuggling weapons-grade uranium across multiple borders while the CIA breathes down your neck? Light stuff.

What Atomic is actually about

Atomic adapts the non-fiction book Atomic Bazaar and drops us in with Max (Allen), a drug smuggler who teams up with JJ (Shazad Latif), an enigmatic outsider with his own baggage. The not-so-voluntary mission: transport highly enriched uranium across North Africa and the Middle East. Shadowing them is undercover CIA officer Cassie Elliott (Samira Wiley), who is sure these two are tied to violent extremists. That certainty puts everyone on a collision course, and the show leans hard into the idea that no one here is telling the full truth. Ulterior motives all around.

"How can you tell the difference between the two sometimes? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?"

That is Allen talking about the show’s moral fog. He also calls Max and JJ anti-heroes, which tracks. Atomic wants you in the gray area: the institutions, the operatives, the criminals — the lines blur by design.

Cast and who is playing who

• Alfie Allen as Max, a drug smuggler who gets pulled into nuclear-grade trouble
• Shazad Latif as JJ, the enigmatic outsider who becomes Max’s partner on the run
• Samira Wiley as Cassie Elliott, an undercover CIA officer convinced the pair are linked to violent extremists

Yes, there is action — and yes, they trained like crazy

If you are picturing car chases, gunfights, and sprinting through tight alleyways, you are in the right neighborhood. Latif says the prep was brutal in a very specific, almost inside-baseball way: an hour of boxing, an hour of gun work, an hour in the gym, day after day. You do not fake that stamina on set.

And because all that exertion has consequences, the diet slid from clean to comfort pretty fast. Allen admits he eventually started petitioning for desserts on set — tiramisu became a coping mechanism. Latif tried to keep it tidy, then surrendered to lamb kebabs, cans of Coke, and whatever chocolate was within arm’s reach. Sometimes you just feed the scene.

When and where to watch

Atomic is a five-part series on Sky Atlantic and is streaming on Sky and NOW. It launched Thursday 28 August 2025.