Posted in: Peacock, TV | Tagged: The Copenhagen test

The Copenhagen Test: Daniel, O'Brien on Showrunners, Spy Genre & More

Peacock's The Copenhagen Test stars Sinclair Daniel and Mark O'Brien on working with Showrunners Thomas Brandon and Jennifer Yale, and more.

With an espionage/spy thriller show like Peacock's The Copenhagen Test, the devil is ALWAYS in the details as stars Sinclair Daniel (The Other Black Girl) and Mark O'Brien (Ready or Not) are finding out playing Parker and Cobb, who are part of an agency that discovers that Alexander Hale (Simu Liu), a first generation Chinese-American intelligence analyst who realizes his brain has been hacked, giving the perpetrators access to everything he sees and hears. Caught between his shadowy agency and the unknown hackers, he must maintain a performance 24/7 to flush out who's responsible and prove where his allegiance lies. Daniel and O'Brien spoke to Bleeding Cool about how the Thomas Brandon-created series offers a fresh take on the espionage/spy thriller genres, working with Brandon and co-showrunner Jennifer Yale, and what specific characteristics they incorporated beyond the script. They also discussed how they approach the genre differently than in their other work.

The Copenhagen Test Stars Sinclair Daniel and Mark O'Brien on Creator Thomas Brandon's Attention to Detail, and Keeping Up with the Demands of an Intense Series

What intrigued you about The Copenhagen Test and its premise?

O'Brien: It is really original. There are certainly spy shows, and there are espionage shows, but I've never seen anything with this idea specifically. It almost feels like something that you feel like we would have seen by now, because of the way technology is growing and the way surveillance seems to be growing as well. I thought it was a unique idea, and then I was told in such a sophisticated way. The creators really built a world as well that you could really see in the script, and then when we got to set, it just ballooned beyond that, so it was really exciting.

Daniel: Seeing how clear these ideas in this world were on paper was really exciting to me, and I knew it could only go up from there if it was that fleshed out on the page. It was exciting to me when I first started.

What's it like working with Thomas and Jennifer as creatives?

O'Brien: They're wonderful. They're so easy to talk to, and ultimately, they have what you want in the showrunners of a TV series, where they have the answers. When you go to them, they're never like, "I'm not sure," "I don't know," or "I haven't thought about that." They've thought through everything. They're quite diligent and comprehensive in the way that they built the show. They have an idea of where they're going with it, so they're wonderful people, but they're also great people to be able to turn to.

Daniel: Yeah, they were always on set, sometimes both, but always one of them. They did a lot of checking in, like, "How are you feeling about this? Do you think you want to lean more into this? Should we adjust it that way?" Not necessarily as an acting note, but from the perspective of, "Do you want us to add this? Would that help you? Is this feeling clear to you?" It was always a dialogue, which I appreciated, and they didn't feel like some faceless person at the back of the theater. They were very hands-on.

Was there anything that helped you get into the minds of your characters, Parker and Cobb? Was there, aside from the script, perhaps some ticks or quirks that you incorporated into your characters?

Daniel: Hmm. I think that for me, it wasn't necessarily a tick or quirk, but Parker spends a lot of time on her own, figuring out puzzles and problems within this world, so it was a lot of thinking face. There were a lot of opportunities for thinkin,g and when you have a realization, like "Where does that happen for her?" Which was cool to play around with.

O'Brien: I found a few things in there where Cobb is desperate to come off refined, well-to-do, very erudite, and all these kinds of things, where he comes from very little, which is revealed in one of the episodes. He can never really show his kind of panic or his discomfort too much, because he wants to fit in. There was one scene I did with Adina (Porter) where I kept moving my hand like this repeatedly, and I found myself doing that in a lot of scenes, but whether it was captured or not. It's just his way of dealing with stress that no one can really notice, because he doesn't want to ever appear too much like he's out of his depth. I don't know, something that I came naturally and I noticed I was doing often. It's funny how those things present themselves.

What does the spy thriller genre allow you to do as an actor that you typically wouldn't find yourself doing on a project? How does it challenge you in a way that you don't really usually think about as an actor?

O'Brien: I think in that genre, everyone at a certain point has to put on a face that's not theirs to some degree, because you don't know who you can trust constantly. That's normally something you'd play as a person who's not in the spy world. It's not always that way. Yes, we act certain ways and hide certain truths, but in this world, there are so many times that you're playing a role, and on this show, we see a lot of that, so that's unique to this world.

Daniel: Yeah, I also think that any project will have a moment where the stakes feel high, but when you're talking about this genre, usually the stakes are always so high and on the global level, and you have to kind of live in that 10 energy for a while, which is not, I'd say, typical of all projects. You get to ebb and flow, but on this show, the energy levels are always peaking.

All eight episodes of The Copenhagen Test, which also stars Melissa Barrera, Brian d'Arcy James, and Kathleen Chalfant, premiere on December 27th on Peacock.

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