Covert Affairs: Q&A with Piper Perabo and Christopher Gorham

If you want quality spy entertainment, do yourself a favor and skip the lines at the theatre. Instead, plop down on the sofa within the comfort of your own home and watch Covert Affairs – USA’s latest summer series about a newly recruited CIA agent, Annie Walker, who’s thrust into the crazy world of espionage.

Poptimal had the opportunity to chat with the stars of the show, Piper Perabo (Annie Walker) and Christopher Gorham (Auggie Andersen, Annie’s CIA friend) about everything from stunts, blind CIA agents, and switching jobs for a life in the CIA.

How do you think Covert Affairs will fit in the rest of USA’s line-up?

Chris Gorham: I think it’ll fit in really well. It has a nice combination of really great action, really great characters and humor that that network does better than anybody.

For those who have yet to see the show, how would you both describe your characters?

Piper Perabo: Annie Walker is a trainee that gets pulled off into the CIA for fieldwork, so although I’m assigned to do these high level jobs where I travel all over the world, I’m not totally trained to do it, so the action is really intense but so is the learning curve for Annie.

Gorham: Auggie’s been there for a while, so he really takes Annie under his wing and shows her the ropes of the CIA which is only mildly ironic since he’s completely blind.

There are a lot of fantastic car chases and action-packed scenes. Piper, did you get to do any of the stunts yourself?

Perabo: Yeah, I got to do a lot of the stunts myself. In the pilot and also in the show we try to do a lot of the stunts ourselves. One of our executive producers (Doug Liman) who also did the Bourne movies has been very active and started creating these high level stunts, car chases and yeah… I’ve been getting to do a lot of it.

Gorham: My voice is wrecked cause we’ve been shooting a fight scene on a train all night, so that was something I’m really excited about.

Chris, as you mentioned, Auggie is a blind CIA agent. How did you prepare yourself to play a blind person?

Gorham: It’s really challenging. I’ve been working really closely with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and they’ve been a huge, huge help, so I’ve made some friends over there and done a lot of work with them. So yeah, I take it pretty seriously and it is a big challenge and I’m still learning.

Annie has a unique skill with languages on the show, but how many languages do you really speak, Piper?

Perabo: I really only speak two, French and English, but so far – in the pilot, I think Annie speaks three different languages – but now, in the series, I’m up to nine different languages.  We’re shooting the show in Toronto, which is the most ethnically diverse city in North America, so so far we’ve been able to find a native speaker for all the different languages which is really cool for the show to have all these different people coming in and lending their talents; it makes the show feel worldwide in its scope.

Is there a language you’ve found more difficult to grasp than the others?

Perabo: Sinhalese has been the most difficult language, that’s what they speak in Sri Lanka. Yeah, I’d never heard that language before but there are Sri Lanken immigrants in Toronto so I had a Sri Lanken teacher who came in and taught me and it’s beautiful, but difficult.

If given the opportunity, would you work for the CIA?

Gorham: Maybe, yeah, maybe. It sounds exciting. I’d have to keep my day job cause the CIA doesn’t pay very well.

Perabo: I think I would. You know, I went to the CIA for the day when I was preparing for the show and I got to meet the agents and analysts there. I think the information analyst is a really interesting job and you see some of that in our show. All the news from all over the world, and satellite feeds, all the information from what’s going on in the world comes live and into the CIA into the analyst room so there are people processing what’s going on all over the world all at the same time so they can trade information. I think that would be a really interesting job.

Covert Affairs premieres Tuesday, July 13th at 10pm EST on USA.

For more information about the show and cast, visit:  www.usanetwork.com/series/covertaffairs/

For more interviews and television reviews, click here.

Photographs courtesy of Robert Ashcroft and USA Network.