Peacock has been bringing us fun new genre series from time to time. And their new series The Copenhagen Test is set to be a wonderfully fun genre bending adventure. And we spoke with Simu Liu, Thomas Brandon, and Jennifer Yale at New York Comic Con for the series!
Liu is executive producing and starring in the series, which has both Yale and Brandon as EPs and showrunners. Together, the three talked about the spy thriller and how they elevated the genre without rinse and repeating it in the same way other spy stories have. The unique aspect of The Copenhagen Test? The show’s ability to push out the use of technology.
You can see the trailer here:
At a roundtable with three other journalists, I asked Yale, Brandon, and Liu about genre and elevating it. You can read the full transcript of our conversation here:
THE MARY SUE: For the last question I wanna get nerdy because like I studied acting, so I always like when you get into genre work and the process of getting into a genre, both as an actor and as creatives because it is so specific and can be shaped in all these different departments. As a team, how was it getting to dive into the spy thriller and make it completely your own and original while still having to have the beats of what a spy thriller is so that an audience is coming in and knowing ‘like, all right, mm-hmm . ‘Alight,I’m gonna have X, Y, and Z,’ but you still get to have your own spin on it
SIMU LIU: That’s a really phenomenal question. What I really loved about it was The Truman Show of it all right? So Alexander Hale, my character in the show, is unknowingly hacked by this nanotechnology that allows an enemy somewhere to see what he sees and hear what he hears. And so once they figure out the game, Alexander and, and the Orphanage that he works for, not a real orphanage but the spy agency, it’s called the Orphanage. Just want to make that clear . But from that point onwards, every single thing, it’s almost like every single blink of an eye, everywhere he looks, and every thing that he says is now a part of performance. It was really interesting and it was hard. We were kind of the meme of like Charlie Day…
THE MARY SUE: Carol???!?
SIMU LIU: [laughs] Yeah. Carol. I think that was all of us for a very long time. But there was a really fun game in just trying to choreograph like, ‘Why is Alexander looking at this,’ down to the blink, down to the eye movement, he is trying to tell his superior something. He’s trying to tell the enemy something. And he’s also trying to tell the audience something. And what information is he conveying to all of these different parties at every single point in time? Kind of threading this kind of impossible needle was the most fun that I’ve ever had, kind of developing this character and breaking him down and really coming out of it with a sense of like, ‘Wow, somebody has to be pretty smart in order to survive a situation like that. And I thank these two greatly for writing a character that was just so much fun to inhabit.
THOMAS BRANDON: What you’re talking about, The Truman Show element, when I first came up with the idea of The Truman Show element was the thing that was kind of evolving the genre forward. It’s not just a spy that we’ve seen before, but spy with a twist and a spy that had something to say about where we are today. And also what was so delightful about it to me, was that in making it so that everything he saw and heard was being broadcast, it took us back to incredibly old school techniques.
THOMAS BRANDON: It’s about being out in the world. It’s about this person’s being followed, but they can’t know they’re being followed. It just felt very tactile. And it felt very kinetic. And it harkened back to that kind of like timeless cold war paranoia and a little bit of the John le Carré novels that I loved as a kid or teenager as well. And so it was that idea of how do we take it one step forward, but take it a step forward and also take us back to an era that feels timeless and comfortable and something we want to be inside of.
JENNIFER YALE: And we did, in, just going off of what Thomas was talking about, we spent a lot of time making sure that a lot of our tech in the upstairs which is The Orphanage in that control room. When you talk about Apollo 13, it was this control room that’s constantly watching what Alexander’s doing and helping him throughout. But we tried to make sure that that was built in an analog way where there’s even, you’ll see there’s a landline with a corded phone as well as, and Thomas was really good about this and being, ‘There cannot be any and any beeps or boops in that.’ And so it was very much all the computers, everything, the screens had a little bit of that grain a little bit that made you feel like it was a period piece.
THOMAS BRANDON: Secure if you really think about it. Because that paper is unhackable. And that’s the thing is like a lot of times, like you go inside Langley, it’s just binders and binders of paper. Like they’re not even using computers for a lot of this stuff. So how do you express that in a way that’s visually interesting? It’s not just, although you had to look at a lot of paper. A lot of paper. There was a lot of paper.
JENNIFER YALE: It’s a lot of paper. The only time we use a screen, an iPad type of thing is to just show video and then make sure that that video looks a little aged.
The Copenhagen Test airs on Peacock on December 27, 2025.
(featured image: Peacock)
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