COVERT AFFAIRS is off to a good start with Chris Gorham and Piper Perabo
If you are loving the new USA crime drama Covert Affairs, you aren’t alone. Almost 5 million viewers tuned into the series premiere where Piper Perabo (best known for Coyote Ugly) plays Annie Walker, a young CIA trainee who is pulled out of training and sent into the active field. Helping her maneuver her way through this new gig is Auggie, played by Chris Gorham (Ugly Betty, Harper’s Island) who may be blind but in many ways is her eyes in this new world she’s been thrust into. Action, intrigue, a dash of humor and super sexy stars? What else could you want in a show?
To get a glimpse inside the new hit, Covert Affairs creators Matt Corman and Chris Ord talked with reporters last week and I was there to toss in a few questions of my own about the show.
Jim Halterman: I was wondering about the decision to make Chris Gorham’s character blind and could you talk about that and what you see is that in maybe being a positive as far as story and that sort of thing.
Matt Corman: Chris Gorham is a really gifted actor, first of all, and he’s doing a tremendous job with it. We’re so appreciative of his efforts because it’s not an easy thing to pull off. The idea to do this character was based, actually, on a friend of ours who was an accident. In his case, he was paralyzed. He was not blinded. But the accident was transformative for him in many ways terrible, but in some ways good. His character changed to a certain extent. He became more inquisitive, more open, in some ways more emotional, so that was the starting off place. We wanted to look at a character who in Auggie’s instance was in the military and was probably a very straightforward person before his accident. But afterwards, it has opened him up to the world, made him a little bit more vulnerable, perhaps given him a sense of humor that he didn’t have before. That was sort of our way into it.
Kari Matchett and Peter Gallagher as Joan and Arthur on COVERT AFFAIRS
Chris Ord: And going from there with Chris Gorham, it was important to us as we cast the role to have an actor who could do it without sunglasses on. I think that when you put those sunglasses on, it really puts a barrier between the character and audience. It was important to us that this character could connect with both Annie and our audience.
MC: Chris has done an amazing job of really throwing himself into trying to understand what it means to live as a blind person. He’s constantly meeting the Canadian Institute for the Blind. We shoot the show in Toronto, Canada. He’s talked to a lot of blind people. He himself is involved in crafting the space in which he works and in which he lives. He’s consulting our set designers as to how a blind person would actually have … a room and what they need to function properly. So in many ways, he himself has become an in-house expert.
CO: And every scene gets blocked that involves Auggie. It’s all determined on what he could do or not do in that situation. So if he doesn’t know that someone has left the room, well, he’ll play that. He’s a really gifted actor and he always has that in his mind and it’s been a great help to the show.
Gorham showing Perabo the ropes in COVERT AFFAIRS
JH: Also talk about launching the show in this world of social media where Twitter is such a big deal and Facebook. Have you guys had a hand in that? Are you guys Tweeting? What’s the impact?
CO: I think we have not been Tweeting. We’re both on Facebook, which is a pretty impressive if you knew us.
MC: I think it’s great. What we do appreciate is that it’s actually really helped launch the show and get the show to people in ways that you couldn’t do before, like this phone call and like the USA Network Web site, where you can see previews and things and interact with other fans of the show. We’re all for it. I think it’s really just helpful in terms of putting the show out there and having it actually interact with the world.
CO: Chris Gorham is huge on Twitter.
MC: So he’s all about it.
CO: And [co-star Peter} Gallagher is on there, too, which ought to be interesting and [co-star] Anne Dudek, too, so we feel the show is well represented on inter-webs.
Question: Can you tell us how you came up with the idea of the show and how is it going to be different from other shows of this kind like Alias..
CO: When we came up with the show, we originally conceived it as more of a workplace show. That was our way into it. We really wanted to examine the CIA as a workplace and all the politics that go along with that and just what it’s like to actually work in such an odd institution. When you really look at the CIA, you realize that if you work there, A, you don’t get a lot of credit for the work you do because you can’t tell anyone about it. B, you don’t make very much money. And so it’s a very interesting person who chooses do this because the upside is just about self-satisfaction and knowing you’re helping your country and doing what you can to help your country.
COVERT AFFAIRS newest addition post-pilot is HEROES alum Sendhil Ramamurthy (here with Matchett)
Question: Moving forward in the series, there’s a character coming up that we really haven’t seen or really anything of yet and that’s [Heroes alum] Sendhil Ramamurthy’s character. So can you speak a little bit about him?
MC: Sendhil is going to be playing a really interesting character named Jai Wilcox who’s a second generation CIA man. First of all, Sendhil is a magnificent actor and we’re really lucky to have him and he’s a good guy to boot. But the character is very complex because he’s caught between two father figures. He’s working for Arthur Campbell, who’s played by Peter Gallagher and then his father was legend at the CIA. So he’s in a very complicated situation and he’s someone who is going to be getting close to Piper’s character for various reasons. And we don’t want to tip our hand too much, but their relationship is going to be very juicy and it’s going to have a lot of layers to it.
Question: Speaking of relationships, one final thing is how would you guys pinpoint the relationship between Annie and Auggie right now and where do you see that going?
CO: I think what we love about the relationship right now, and it’s both on screen and off screen, is that Piper and Chris just became fast friends immediately both as Auggie and Annie, but also off screen. And they get along really well and you feel that when you see them interact on screen. So we really see the relationship right now as friendship and it’s great for Annie to have such a cool mentor in the agency. But over time and over the series, I think if we have the fortune of having a number of seasons, we would definitely explore romantic possibilities between the two, but that would be way down the road.
Question: Can you talk about designing the series and crafting the arcs and mythology?
MC: We did think about the season and what we wanted to do with that and as we were crafting all 11 episodes that will follow the pilot. And then there … little, I think, cues here and there that hopefully the audiences will pick up on in terms of playing that mythology out. But it was certainly in our minds as we crafted the season, and then within that, we wanted to write individual episodes that could stand on their own, so that there’d be a case or something or mission that Annie has to complete by the end of the episode. So we’re cognizant of doing both.
Covert Affairs airs Tuesdays at 10/9c.
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Jim Halterman spends his days interviewing the top tier of talent and creative forces in the entertainment world and then, because he's that kind of guy, he brings it all to YOU! And, because we all like free stuff, check back often for giveaways!! 
