Jonathan Sim
There’s a particular flavor of paranoia that defines The Copenhagen Test—one that feels unnervingly modern. Set inside a top-secret intelligence agency known as The Orphanage, the Peacock spy thriller centers on Alexander Hale, a first-generation Chinese-American analyst who’s spent his career overlooked and underestimated. When Alexander begins to suspect that he might be the very mole his agency is hunting—and realizes that his eyes and ears may have been hacked—the ground beneath him starts to shift. Suddenly, even his most intimate moments may be part of an elaborate illusion, designed not just to test his loyalty, but to weaponize his perception of reality itself.
That destabilizing premise is what gives The Copenhagen Test its edge. This isn’t a series about sleek spy training montages or globe-trotting bravado; it’s about surveillance so invasive that it turns life into a performance. As the agency builds a carefully curated fake world around Alexander—complete with a new job, a dangerous mission, and a manufactured romantic relationship—the show constantly asks how anyone can know who they are when everything they see and hear may be a lie.
I sat down with the team behind the series to discuss the show’s complex layers, the art of acting with secrets, and the terrifying reality of being watched. The roster included stars Simu Liu and Melissa Barrera, showrunners Thomas Brandon and Jennifer Yale, and supporting cast members Sinclair Daniel, Mark O’Brien, Brian d’Arcy James, and Kathleen Chalfant.
The tension in the show is embodied most clearly in Simu Liu’s Alexander and Melissa Barrera’s Michelle, a fellow agent who becomes an integral part of the illusion constructed around him. When I asked about the challenge of playing characters who are themselves constantly performing, Liu said, “You described every day on set for us. One of the cool things about our show is that we’re always a few steps ahead of the audience. There is a lot of interplay between the different layers and how our characters show up in their world, but also in this Truman Show-esque construct that we’ve put on for an enemy who is watching everything Alexander is seeing and doing.”
For Liu, that layering became one of the most exciting parts of the job. “Speaking as an actor, it’s a really fun challenge. It’s great to be able to play different layers and dimensions,” he said, before turning to his co-star. “[To Melissa] And you were great. I loved seeing you snap in and out of character. It was like two different snaps that you would play, and it was really fun.”
Barrera echoed just how technical and constant that awareness had to be. “It was a constant before every scene—like, ‘Alright, where are we? What level of the character am I playing?’ It was a constant reminder so that we could track that,” she explained. “It’s an important thing to sell to the audience that there are different versions of them. If that works, the show works and becomes more compelling. You know, the potatoes don’t bake themselves.”
“They don’t bake themselves,” Liu quickly agreed.
That playful back-and-forth energy also defines the chemistry between the two leads, something that becomes especially apparent when the conversation veers away from espionage and into hypotheticals. Since The Copenhagen Test revolves around the idea of seeing and hearing through someone else’s senses, the pair were asked which of their past characters they’d want to inhabit for a day.
“I don’t have anyone cool like Shang-Chi,” Barrera joked.
“You’ve played some pretty badass characters,” Liu shot back.
When pressed, Barrera eventually landed on her character, Laura, in Your Monster. “Just because having a monster in your house would be fun and weird.”
Liu, meanwhile, went in a very different direction. “I think for me, Ken [from Barbie],” he said. “When we were making that movie, Greta [Gerwig] was like, ‘I don’t know where the Kens go at night.’ We were trying to figure out what the Kens did because only the Barbies in Barbieland have houses. So, we think that all the Kens just go to the beach and stand there in silence because Barbies and Kens don’t sleep.” He then delivered the punchline. “If you were to hack Ken’s brain—first of all, not a lot of brain to go through, not a lot going on—I think you would just see him standing on a beach waiting for a Barbie to show up so he could flex his muscles.”
That humor carries over into how the actors assess their own spy potential. Asked who would be better at espionage in real life, Liu initially backed himself. “I think me, because I think I’m better at blending in. Melissa is too noticeable.”
“I think he’s too famous,” Barrera countered instantly. “Honestly, we were out in Toronto, and we couldn’t walk five steps without someone stopping him.”
The debate escalated quickly. “No, I actually feel like I would be better because I have a better poker face,” Barrera said. “We played a lot of board games while we were shooting this, and I could always tell when he was lying, bluffing, or angry,” she added.
“I feel like I beat you a good number of times,” Liu protested, mentioning a game they played described as a type of Mafia.
There’s a constant tension that exists throughout the show—something that showrunners Thomas Brandon and Jennifer Yale were very intentional about from the start. Brandon traced the spark of the series back to both classic spy fiction and a deeply contemporary fear. “I had the idea that the next thing we should be worried about is not just our phones and our laptops being hacked, but our eyes and ears,” he said. “The most interesting person in the world to get hacked would be someone working at a spy agency, realizing, ‘Oh, just by looking at this document, I’m compromising national security.’”
Yale emphasized why the concept demanded a television format rather than a feature film. “I always like to look at film as the most important moment in a character’s life, whereas a TV show is the most important journey,” she said. “We had so much to tell in regards to Alexander’s journey…There is so much more to show you.”
That journey extends beyond Alexander to characters like Parker and Cobb, played by Sinclair Daniel and Mark O’Brien, who both immediately sensed that The Copenhagen Test wasn’t a standard genre exercise. “I thought, ‘This is unique, this is different. I want to watch this show,’” O’Brien said after reading the script. Daniel agreed, noting that, “If you start with a solid foundation of a really thrilling story, you’re in a great spot.”
Across the cast—from agency newcomers to seasoned veterans like Brian d’Arcy James and Kathleen Chalfant—there’s a shared understanding that what makes The Copenhagen Test stand out is its obsession with subtext, restraint, and the unease of not knowing who’s watching. As Chalfant put it simply, the writing itself was the hook: “The scripts are written like a novel…I just wanted to keep reading it because I wanted to see what happened.”
In a world where personalization algorithms already shape so much of daily life, The Copenhagen Test takes that anxiety to its logical extreme. Or, as Brandon joked while contemplating future fears, “I always live with the assumption that our children and grandchildren are watching us right now in this room, like reverse ancestors.”
In The Copenhagen Test, that assumption isn’t paranoia—it’s the premise. And once the show invites you into Alexander Hale’s compromised perspective, it dares you to ask the same unsettling question he does: if someone is always watching, how do you ever stop performing?
The Copenhagen Test premieres on December 27 on Peacock.
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