In June I was privy to a peek behind the scenes at the hit USA Network show, Covert Affairs. Starring Piper Perabo as Annie Walker, the newest C.I.A. recruit who must balance her professional life with her personal life all while trying to stay alive in the kill or be killed spy world. Well written and highly entertaining Covert Affairs offers a great ensemble cast and sharp writing.
During a break in filming, a group of reporters were able to sit down with Piper who was on location at a tiny airport terminal outside Toronto, Canada.
PANEL: So we heard for the Paris episode you actually filmed in Paris, and you flew out for like 36 hours and came right back?
PIPER PERABO: Yeah, we actually flew from-, we filmed in Puerto Rico for Guam, for the premiere and then we flew then onto Paris. So we did Toronto, Puerto Rico, Paris, straight back-, no, then a day in New York, then back to Toronto.
PANEL: All within like what 40, 48 hours, maybe?
PIPER PERABO: It was like-, we were there for two and a half days in Puerto Rico, and 36 hours in Paris, but there were, you know, like layovers, and flying, I think it was like five or six days altogether.
PANEL: What a whirlwind.
PIPER PERABO: Yeah, it was really fun though, it was great. And to, to, you know, run out into the real world is always kind of like a mind blower, and like it’s your actor dream come true is that you’re running across, you know, the Plaza at the Louvre, and it’s the Plaza at the Louvre. You don’t have to do that much work to imagine it.
PANEL: This summer, Covert Affairs is going to be making its debut at Comic-Con, are you excited to be able to interact with the fans, and hear some of the reaction to the show…
PIPER PERABO: I’ve never been…
PANEL: …in person?
PIPER PERABO: I’ve never been to Comic-Con, so I-, but I have friends who have, my friend Lena Heady did the 300 and so she was there, and Chris Pine told me about it, and we’re going with Sendhil, so apparently like going with one of the heroes is like going with a, you know, going with Mr. Spock or whatever to Comic-Con’s going to be pretty full on. But 
he’s been giving me a lot of pointers, he’s like, you just got to be cool, we’re going to do a lot of photos, you got to fluff up your hair a lot. I think it’ll be really fun. It’ll be cool to go with someone like Sendhil, ’cause he kind of knows the lay of the land. And apparently, it’s huge. I can’t really imagine it. I wonder too, like what are the-, ’cause they were saying, you know, when you have to-, apparently, the place is so big, and so there’s all different casts there, and you’ve got to move everybody around and blah, blah, blah, so I can’t wait to see the kind of backstage hallways, you know what I mean, like do the different casts like pass each other? Are there rumbles? Do people know each other? You know what I mean, are people making out that know each other secretly from other shows? Like what’s backstage, I always want to know like what’s going down there. It’ll be awesome.
PANEL: How hard is it to kick butt in your Louboutins?
PIPER PERABO: It’s always hard, this-, I get to wear sneakers, obviously, and we did one other episode where I’m on the Poland / Belarus border, that was the episode that we shot with Peter Stormare, which is super cool, and I got to wear boots in that episode, too. So I’m getting a little spoiled this year, I’ve had two episodes not in Louboutins. It’s much easier to kick butt in a flat. But I’m not going to get, you know, too comfortable. I like kicking butt.
PANEL: What kind of training are you getting for the show?
PIPER PERABO: We’re still doing mixed martial arts, so the fighting style is still a mix of like very tight hand-to-hand combat, Krav Maga. For some reason this year it’s a lot more running, I don’t know, I think they like how it looks running-, I don’t know, it just gets exciting, I don’t know why, the cameras guys are like exhausted when they’re running backwards. I think they like it when I have to be in heels, ’cause it keeps me slow enough so the camera guys can-, we had a-, in the Argentina episode, I don’t think it’s aired yet, we’re running through the woods and one of the camera guys actually like took a spill. Like he’s like running backwards and it was like whoa, and he was out. He was fine, but I appreciate that other people are taking risks as well.
PANEL: Speaking of learning things for the show, how about any languages? Have you had to come up with-, like learn any new languages?
PIPER PERABO: Well, I did more Russian this year, we did Russian in the pilot in season one, and I did a three page scene in Russian in the-, in Peter’s episode, which was the biggest foreign language scene I’ve done. I mean, the most-, and especially because it’s in Cyrillic, so you have to learn it, you know, so phonetically and then which sound means what, and blah, blah, blah. I don’t know if we put a new language in this year, but I-, that Russian scene, we sing in that scene, too, we sing in Russian, we get drunk. So you’re getting progressively more drunk and speaking in Russian. At one point, I looked at the writer and I was like, really? Three pages? Drunk in Russian? And she was like, you said you wanted to do the languages. So the Russian scene was hard, but fun. There was a Russian guy in the scene, too, so he could kind of correct me.
PANEL: You’ve done both TV and film, do you prefer one to the other? Or is it just work?
PIPER PERABO: They’re both so separate, you know, I did, I did an indie right before I came up here to start this season, and now doing film seems like so slow. You know, like theatre seems slow compared to film, ’cause you get all this time to rehearse, and you can really take your time, and you talk about every little minutia. And now film seems slow compared to television, because you shoot 10 pages a day on TV, you would never shoot that many. So it’s really different, and I think it just requires-, in a way I’m glad that I did TV third, ’cause I think you have to really trust your instincts, you’re really-, it’s going so fast that you’re just making decisions kind of in the moment, so you have to kind of be open and available to, to do that. I hope it comes out okay.
PANEL: Are we looking forward to any moments where like the glass kind of shatters in Annie’s world? We heard earlier from Sendhil that he might be going a little darker this season, in which case, that might just kind of rock or shatter a little bit of her perception of him.
PIPER PERABO: Yeah, Chris also has a moment of shattering my perception, maybe he
didn’t tell you about that. Yeah, things start to get mixed around, and also, Annie has more love interest this year, so that starts to get a little difficult to balance. I’ve got that problem in this episode, actually. More than one, you know, pan on the stove.
PANEL: Anyone in particular you want to play your-, as Annie’s love interest?
PIPER PERABO: Ooh. I’m always fighting to get Ben Wishaw, do you know that actor? I really like Ben Wishaw. And I just saw the Mother Fucker in the Hat, that new play on Broadway, I think it’d be really fun to have Yul Vazquez and Bobby Cannavale come on the show. I like them.
PANEL: So have you gotten a gun yet?
PIPER PERABO: No. No, and you know, I always have one on the poster, so it was so weird that I don’t have one in the show. But I did an episode with Noam Jenkins who plays the FBI agent, Agent Rossabi, and he was like, you know, you still don’t have a gun, and all this stuff we were doing-, and he was like, I could give you a gun. So I started to talking to the writers about it, I was like, maybe I could get a-, you know, not necessarily issued, but acquire a secret weapon. But then, you know, it makes the fights scenes-, I mean, I do like that I don’t have a gun, because I think it makes the fight scenes and all the action sequences, by nature, then have to be much more creative. You know, where you get your weapons, your-, it’s much-, you’re much more vulnerable, obviously, if you don’t have a weapon, even if the other person doesn’t have one either, because unless I’m fighting a woman my size, I’m really at a disadvantage. And we did a fight scene in this-, I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say-, well, whatever. We did this fight scene…
PANEL: (Laughter.) We won’t tell.
PIPER PERABO: Nobody come in here. We did this fight scene underneath a planetarium and-, where I’m fighting a girl my size, and only the safety lights are on, so not only is it dark and light, but there’s no weapons, and we’re evenly matched. So to me that was really cool, and if you have a gun, that kind of stuff would never happen. So I’m not really for getting the gun yet, it’s more fun without. It’ll be a big thing for her to get one, I think.
PANEL: Well, how much input do you have in creating your character, expanding her background?
PIPER PERABO: I mean, I-, I offer lots of suggestions, which are usually like, oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, you know what I mean. But we talk about it a lot, and, and we also go a lot by, you know, we have advisors with-, at the CIA, and CIA officers do not carry guns on American soil, because they don’t have a badge, right, so you can’t really explain the gun if you’re a banker or whatever. So they only really carry them on foreign soil, and even then sometimes they don’t. I’ve spoken to one agent that I now know, who said-, I said, what kind of-, ’cause you can carry the weapon of your preference when you’re on foreign soil. And so I said, what’s your weapon of preference? And she said, I purposefully don’t carry a weapon, because I think it would spook my assets. So she has security that her assets don’t know are in the room, or standing in the street or something, and they have weapons, but she doesn’t carry, because she thinks it’ll make the assets nervous.
PANEL: So how much research went into you getting this role initially?
PIPER PERABO: I-, all I could do before I got the role was read, you know, and I saw a lot of spy films, I really like Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Legacy of Ashes was a book that was really helpful. But it wasn’t until I got it that I got entrée into Langley, because Doug Liman was making Fair Game. So then I met Valerie Plame, and she became our advisor on the pilot, and then I got actually entrée into Langley and spent time there, and time with agents, and then I really got the access.
PANEL: Dar Long from the Voice of TV. So you’ve got some access to agents, so how do they feel about it? You know, are they still really happy?
PIPER PERABO: You know, it’s funny, they’re-, because we paint the, the agency in a fairly positive and like humane light, I think overall they approve. I don’t think we’d have the access to the information that we get from Langley if they didn’t like the show, if it was a negative portrayal. But one of the writers who was at Langley this year said he was talking to a-, she, she’s an analyst, there’s like three wings. There’s the officers, who are like secret agents, and then analysts, who are doing the sort of news and information coming in from all over the world, and then science and technology, and this one was an analyst, but she’s-, he said, yeah, you know, we do Covert Affairs and she’s like, yeah, my husband watches it. But she was clearly like not a fan, which is so weird for her to give them the tour. So I think overall they approve, but they don’t all like it. I don’t know, to each his own.
PANEL: I was going to ask if there is any cover that you would like to see Annie take at some point? If there was anything you could do as a cover?
PIPER PERABO: There is something that I’ve been working on this with the writers. Well, I want to do-, it would have to be like a season opener or something, so that you could push the trailer for it, because I think it would be fun that as a cover Annie had to get married. But so in the trailers you would see-, and maybe she’s marrying like Jai, or Auggie, and you see like the dress, and you’re walking down the aisle, and you start to see like the people in the audience, there’s like Joan, and Arthur, and Henry Wilcox, and all these people. And so in the trailers you think she’s going to marry somebody, but then somewhere in the ceremony like all hell breaks loose and you just blow the place up with guns, and exploding flowers, and the priest is CIA. Don’t you think it’d be-, ’cause first of all, a wedding dress is a great thing to hide weapons in. And like the whole like, you know what I mean, I don’t know, running-, I think it would be really cool to be getting married as a cover. I don’t know why you would have to get married, but, but they’ll figure that part out, I just want to wear the dress.
PANEL: That sounds like a lot of fun.
PIPER PERABO: It’d be an awesome fight scene in a wedding dress.
PANEL: Okay, great, thanks so much.
PIPER PERABO: Thank you guys so much, thanks for coming.
Covert Affairs airs Tuesday nights at 10pm on USA Network.
