A CALL TO SPY - SARAH MEGAN THOMAS INTERVIEW

A Call To Spy is the fascinating untold story of three WW2 heroines.

In the beginning of WWII, with Britain becoming desperate, Churchill orders his new spy agency – “SOE” – to recruit and train women as spies. Their daunting mission: conduct sabotage and build a resistance. SOE’s “Spymistress,” Vera Atkins (Stana Katic) recruits two unusual candidates: Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas), an ambitious American with a wooden leg, and Noor Inayat Khan (played by Radhika Apte), a Muslim pacifist. Together, these women help to undermine the Nazi regime in France, leaving an unmistakable legacy in their wake. Inspired by true stories, this original screenplay draws on SOE, OSS (precursor to CIA), and CIA files, as well as interviews with living relatives.

This is the untold story about the personal sacrifice of courageous individuals who put their lives on the line to fight for freedom.

Sarah Megan Thomas who brings Virginia Hill to life not only stars in the film but she wrote and produced it as well. Sarah wrote the original screenplay based on years of research, which included reading historical records. To prepare to play Virginia Hall, Sarah Megan Thomas interviewed Virginia Hall's living relatives.

Virginia Hall , code named Marie and Diane, was an American who worked with the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in France during World War II.

The purpose of SOE and OSS was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE and OSS agents in France allied themselves with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from England. After World War II Hall worked for the Special Activities Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Hall was a pioneering agent for the SOE, arriving in France in August 1941, the first female agent to take up residence in France. She created the Heckler network in Lyon. Over the next 15 months, she "became an expert at support operations – organizing resistance movements; supplying agents with money, weapons, and supplies; helping downed airmen to escape; offering safe houses and medical assistance to wounded agents and pilots." She fled France in November 1942 to avoid capture by the Germans.

She returned to France as a wireless operator for the OSS in March 1944 as a member of the Saint network. Working in territory still occupied by the German army and mostly without the assistance of other OSS agents, she supplied arms, training, and direction to French resistance groups, called maquis, especially in Haute-Loire where the maquis cleared the department of German soldiers prior to the arrival of the American army in September 1944.

The Germans gave her the nickname Artemis, and the Gestapo reportedly considered her "the most dangerous of all Allied spies. Hall had an artificial foot she named "Cuthbert." She was also known as "the limping lady" by the Germans and as "Marie of Lyon" by many of the SOE agents she assisted.

I spoke with Sarah Megan Thomas about bringing Virginia and these other heroines to life.

A CALL TO SPY in theaters and on VOD on October 2, 2020