During a recent conference call, Covert Affairs executive producer Doug Liman told us about the various exciting places where the show is going this season. And I mean actual geographical places, not just narrative ones!
Some places they’ve gone or will be going soon:
“Obviously it wasn’t a stretch that we would think of going to Paris … We went to Sri Lanka last year, you know, that’s not something you necessarily would ordinarily think of … We sort of think, okay, we haven’t been to that part of the world in a little while – because sometimes as the show goes there but we don’t physically take the actors there, not every week. But most weeks we actually travel, the show travels to some exotic location but the reality is that the actors stay behind in Toronto and we send a crew to the exotic location. This season we’ve already sent Piper [Perabo] to Puerto Rico and Paris. We’re sending Chris Gorham to Turkey. We have trips planned to Berlin … But maybe the thing I’m most excited about in the whole season is we have a trip planned to Rio for Piper coming up. And that’s one of the great things about being in the second season and having been a hit in our first season is we’re being allowed to do something extraordinary.”
But it’s not all fun and games for the actors …
“The main limiting thing now is just physical stamina because, you know, I went to Paris with Piper and it’s physically grueling. She flew in for basically 36 hours – not basically, exactly 36 hours. It’s a long distance to fly and she wasn’t vacationing for 36 hours, she was working for 36 hours. And then she flew back and had to go back to work in Toronto. So we have to think about how it’s a long season this year. It’s 16 episodes, you know, that’s why it’s not always Piper who travels and that ultimately is going to be the delimiting factor in how much travel we can do. It is physically taxing for an actor to travel to a city in a totally different time zone and then work there and then travel back.”
And where would he like to take his cast, if he had free rein?
“If you told me I could choose any place on the planet to take an episode and take some of our cast, it would be North Korea. There’s no more dangerous or exciting place for a spy to go today than North Korea.”
Follow the exciting journeys of Covert Affairs on Tuesday nights at 10/9c on USA!
