The landscape of the television spy thriller is often a crowded one, frequently relying on familiar tropes of high-speed chases and clear-cut moral boundaries. However, Peacock’s latest offering, “The Copenhagen Test”, which releases all eight episodes today, Saturday, December 27, manages to subvert those expectations by blending grounded espionage with a chilling, near-future science fiction premise. Created and co-showrun by Thomas Brandon (“Legacies”) alongside co-showrunner Jennifer Yale (“See”, “Outlander”), the series explores the terrifying vulnerability of the human mind in an era of total surveillance.
At the center of the storm is Alexander Hale, played by executive producer and star Simu Liu (“Barbie”, “Marvel’s Shang-Chi”). Hale is a first-generation Chinese-American intelligence analyst working for a clandestine agency known as The Orphanage. The series kicks off with a devastating realization: Hale’s brain has been hacked. The perpetrators now have access to everything he sees and hears in real time. This forces Hale into a permanent, 24/7 performance as he attempts to flush out the hackers while convincing his own agency that he hasn’t been compromised.
To pull back the curtain on the show’s complex internal logic and groundbreaking representation, the creative team and ensemble cast sat down with Awards Focus during a recent press junket to discuss the series’ evolution from a 2017 concept to a 2025 reality.
For Thomas Brandon, the journey to this premiere began nearly a decade ago. The concept grew out of a desire to push the boundaries of current technological anxieties. “The idea first came to me in 2017,” Brandon explains. “As a science fiction writer, I was kind of always pushing myself to say, what’s the next thing? What’s five minutes in the future? Right now, I’m worried about my phone being hacked and my laptop being hacked. What’s next? I started thinking about eyes and ears, and who is the most interesting person in the world to have his eyes and ears hacked?”
This internal violation creates a unique narrative structure that Brandon likens to a psychological experiment. “I realized like, oh, we’re also making a Truman Show world,” Brandon notes. “We’re making a world where they’re going to assign him a girlfriend. He’s not going to know what’s real or not, as he’s trying to figure out who can I trust and who’s done this to me. It’s a spy show with an element of romance, with an element of sci-fi, and with this kind of Truman Show weirdness.”
The Enigma of Allegiance: Melissa Barrera and the Art of the Double-Cross
One of the most compelling figures Hale encounters is a mysterious agent played by Melissa Barrera (“In the Heights”, “Scream V” and “VI”). Her character serves as a primary source of both tension and attraction, leaving the audience constantly questioning her true motives. For Barrera, taking on the role meant leaning into the unknown, both in terms of the character’s secrets and the physical demands of the part.
“I had seen the first two scripts. That was it,” Barrera says regarding her knowledge of the season’s arc. “I had been told kind of loosely what the arc was going to be, but then receiving each script after that was always exciting because I was like, what are they going to write for me now? It’s always like something like pulling the rug from under me where I’m just trying to create this character, and then they’re like, nope, scratch that. Because that wasn’t truthful. She’s actually this.”
Beyond the narrative twists, Barrera underwent rigorous training to portray an elite operative. “The amount of action, the amount of fighting that you do in this, and oftentimes opposite someone who’s had a lot of training in martial arts and fighting… it was one of my main focuses because I had never done hand to hand combat before. Not at this level anyway,” Barrera admits. “I wanted it to be believable that she’s like a trained professional, and I wanted her to have her own, like, style of fighting, and I wanted her to be a badass. I did a lot of sessions with the stunt team. I would go and train with them and just learn technique like drill technique, drill punches, drill kicks. So when we got to the choreography part, I already knew all the basics, all the basic movements, and then I could just focus on the storytelling.”
Internal Surveillance: Sinclair Daniel and the Moral Maze
While Barrera represents the external mystery, Sinclair Daniel (“The Other Black Girl”, “Insidious: The Red Door”) provides the internal pressure. Her character, Parker, is an agent within The Orphanage assigned to monitor Hale from the inside. It is a role that requires a delicate balance of empathy and clinical observation.
“I think for me, especially in the beginning, it was about just earnestly like doing what is on the page because we’re all still sussing each other out,” Daniel says. “Any action, any reaction can mean anything. So people are going to attach meanings to whatever happens anyway. So as long as I was focused on the story and there was so much that Parker herself is also trying to figure out that I think it all just gets mixed up into one performance where you’re like, are they really doing that? Or are they just pretending to do that, or do they really believe that?”
The uncertainty of the plot was mirrored in the filming process, as the actors often did not know the final destination of their characters. Daniel found this lack of information to be an asset for her performance. “It also prevents you from subconsciously telling on yourself,” Daniel explains. “It allows everything to be new and surprising and immediate, which is all we’re trying to do as actors.”
The Architecture of The Orphanage: Chalfant and James
The agency itself, The Orphanage, is a fascinating concept: a clandestine intelligence body that secretly watches the other intelligence agencies. In a world where public trust in institutions is at an all-time low, the showrunners wanted to explore the human element behind these monolithic organizations.
“The government is us,” Thomas Brandon asserts. “There’s this tendency to say like, oh, those people over there, the CIA, the FBI, they do these things, and we don’t sit there and realize, like, I am safe today because they did this thing that I would feel queasy doing. I wanted to express that level of ambiguity about it, but also to say, like, at the end of the day, every single agency is full of people.”
This moral ambiguity is embodied by the senior officials at the agency, played by Brian d’Arcy James (“Spotlight”, “13 Reasons Why”) and Kathleen Chalfant (“Wit”, “The Affair”). Their characters, Saint George and Moira, navigate the high-level ethical dilemmas that define the series.
“Who’s watching the watchers, right, is an issue that we deal with all the time,” Chalfant (says. “There are some times in the course of the postwar history in which no one was watching the watchers, and then periods in which the watchers were watched, and then periods in which it felt like chaos.”
Brian d’Arcy James approached his character through the lens of professional duty rather than grand ideology. “I’ve had a couple of very illuminating conversations with people who are in this world or adjacent to this world,” James shares. “The thing that struck me about their work and how they approached it was the very nuts and bolts aspect of the job. The total effect of the job can be dramatic, but I think in the reality of things, the way that these people operate is that there’s just a lot of little dots to connect, and that can be very mundane and boring. Of course, the bigger picture is the dramatic picture. I think there’s a very dutiful way of wanting to get the job done in a very boring way in terms of just not being very exciting.”
Friendship and Rivalry: Mark O’Brien’s Competitive Edge
Adding another layer to the pressure cooker within The Orphanage is Mark O’Brien (“City on a Hill”, “Ready or Not”). He plays a friend and rival to Hale named Cobb, a character whose personal ties and professional ambitions make him a wildcard in the investigation into Hale’s hack. Like his castmates, O’Brien thrived on the episodic reveal of the script.
“We were getting them as you go along, which is often the case,” O’Brien notes. “There’s some sort of excitement of getting it as you’re going along. It’s not just that personal joy. There’s also something about it that I think is quite instructive, because you’re finding out just now, and so there’s a certain energy to it that you’re going to bring the next day. I think it piques your curiosity about your own character even more when you’re learning as it’s happening.”
O’Brien also highlights the inherent tension of the agency setting. “When you’re in this kind of world, you don’t want to reveal too much. Naturally, I think even in the break room, these people probably don’t want to say too much because everything is of the utmost importance. We’re dealing with, in a sense, running a country because we’re above everything else. Everything is sort of restrained.”
A New Standard for Representation
While “The Copenhagen Test” succeeds as a thriller, it is equally significant for its commitment to diverse representation in a genre that has historically been lacking it. The fact that the three central characters are played by Simu Liu, Melissa Barrera, and Sinclair Daniel is a deliberate and meaningful choice by the production team.
“Visibility is so essential and constructive in what a community thinks that is possible for them,” Barrera says. “I’ve always loved spy shows and spy movies, and I’ve just never seen a show like ours where you have Simu, you have me, and you have Sinclair Daniel. And we’re like the central characters, and none of us are white. The show isn’t specifically about that, but it is in a sense, because it’s talking about the sense of belonging. I feel like a lot of marginalized communities are constantly fighting to belong to prove that they are worth their place.”
Thomas Brandon echoes this sentiment, noting how Simu Liu’s involvement helped hone the specific cultural nuances of Alexander Hale’s character. “We knew the best version of Alexander Hale is a first generation story,” Brandon explains. “Specifically when James Wan’s company came on board, we started talking about him as someone who is Asian American. And then when we met Simu, we honed in on a Chinese-Canadian and honed in on how specifically that informed the character. The word allegiance is so loaded, especially for people of Asian American heritage, because there is this pressure to prove that you are disconnected from the places and people that have made you who you are.”
Jennifer Yale emphasizes that the diversity within the clandestine agency is actually a reflection of reality. “In being able to represent our country, it is diverse,” Yale says. “In the clandestine agency, it is way more diverse than you think. For this idealist agency of The Orphanage, it’s really sort of looking at and making sure that everyone stays in the line.”
The Verdict: A Binge-Worthy Mystery
“The Copenhagen Test” is a rare genre-bending success. It maintains the breakneck pace of a spy thriller while forcing the audience to grapple with the same question Hale faces: what is real? The “Copenhagen Test” itself refers to a high-stakes ethical measurement of loyalty, a concept that permeates every interaction in the series.
Whether it is Melissa Barrera’s tactical precision, Sinclair Daniel’s watchful eyes, or the calculated authority of d’Arcy James and Chalfant, every performance is tuned to a high frequency of suspicion. As the series drops in its entirety on Peacock, it offers a bingeable adventure that demands your full attention. The twists are frequent, the stakes are existential, and as the characters suggest, it might make you want to put your phone in another room.
“Assume the worst,” Mark O’Brien advises with a laugh. “I think it’s safe to assume the worst because we don’t know. That to me is exciting. I want to watch something that is outside of my world, but it’s something I can believe could happen.”
“The Copenhagen Test” is now streaming on Peacock.