‘Young Sherlock’: Guy Ritchie Series Adds Max Irons!!

Guy Ritchie‘s upcoming Young Sherlock now has its Young Mycroft. Max Irons will play Holmes’ older, smarter brother in the upcoming Amazon Prime Video series. Deadline reports that Irons will star opposite Hero Fiennes Tiffin‘s Sherlock. Based on the characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle, Young Sherlock is an adaptation of Andy Lane‘s Young Sherlock Holmes books, which depicts a nineteen-year-old Sherlock as he finds himself untethered at Oxford University — until he stumbles on a murder mystery with wide-ranging consequences.

Irons, who led the Epix thriller series Condor and is the son of actors Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack, will co-star alongside Fiennes Tiffin and a distinguished cast of thespians, including Dónal Finn (The Wheel of Time), Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love), Natascha McElhone (The Crown), Zine Tseng (3 Body Problem) and Colin Firth (The King’s Speech). The eight-episode series is currently filming in the UK.

Who Is Mycroft Holmes?

Mycroft Holmes is even more intelligent and precise than his younger brother Sherlock but possesses no ambition or physical drive, so he is content with a never-explained position in the government; however, he does occasionally advise Sherlock on his cases. First appearing in Doyle’s 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” Mycroft only makes significant appearances in one other story, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” but is a sufficiently memorable creation that he has become a staple of Holmes adaptations on stage and screen — although he did not appear in the famous 1940s Basil Rathbone Holmes films.

Notable portrayers of Mycroft include Christopher Lee, in Billy Wilder‘s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes; Charles Gray in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and the Jeremy Brett TV series; Mark Gatiss on Sherlock; Rhys Ifans on Elementary; and Stephen Fry in Ritchie‘s own Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

Ritchie, who directed Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in 2009’s Sherlock Holmes and its sequel, will make his return to the character with Young Sherlock; he will direct and executive produce the series. It’s his latest foray into series television after The Gentlemen, a spin-off of his 2019 film of the same name, premiered on Netflix earlier this year. Matthew Parkhill (Deep State) will executive produce, write, and showrun the series; also executive producing are Simon Kelton, Ivan Atkinson, Simon Maxwell, Dhana Gilbert, Colin Wilson, Marc Resteghini, and co-executive producer Harriet Creelman.