Peacock’s Spy Sci-Fi ‘The Copenhagen Test’ Uses This Classic Movie’s Bold Twist, Plus 5 Things We Learned From Set
March in Toronto is a different kind of cold compared to where you might live. It’s not the cinematic kind where you’re bundled up in about three to 50 layers, but the kind that gets into your bones while gaslighting you into thinking it’s already spring. Outside Etobicoke’s Cinespace Studios, it’s a very gray morning with heavy clouds that are not entirely sure if they want to put on a show with snow or rain, or just watch you suffer between those two possibilities. But inside, things are a lot different. The atmosphere is tightly wound — not loud or chaotic, but just super busy. Silence feels almost intentional, like someone might be listening, because, as it is, in The Copenhagen Test, someone always is.
Peacock’s latest sci-fi espionage thriller isn’t the type to make itself known with explosions or loud fight sequences. Instead, its action festers deep within the walls of a covert intelligence unit known as the Orphanage. As a place that most of the U.S. intelligence community doesn’t know exists, its watchdog team operates on the idea that some of the most terrifying threats aren’t external — they’re internal. Not only is the truth hidden in systems and routines, but eventually, in your own mind. At the center of it all is Simu Liu’s Alexander Hale, a first-generation Chinese-American intelligence analyst who finds out that his brain has been hacked — not metaphorically, but literally. From everything he sees and hears, he is unknowingly broadcasting to an unknown enemy. Obviously, the solution means he has to perform constantly. In what feels like Minority Report meets The Truman Show with a sprinkle of The Bourne Identity, Alexander agrees to play double duty to flush out the people watching him, while pretending he doesn’t know he’s being surveilled. Along the way, he is questioning his own reality, loyalties, and whether the organization he works for is truly protecting him — or just studying the fallout. Earlier this year, Collider, along with other media, was invited to step inside that world on set in Toronto with the cast and showrunners.
‘The Copenhagen Test’ Is a ‘Truman Show’-Style Series for the Surveillance Age
At the heart of The Copenhagen Test is an idea its creator, Thomas Brandon, references outright as a structural blueprint for the series’ boldest and most terrifying idea. As a fan of John le Carré and that kind of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy espionage world, as he puts it, Brandon admits that “the smartest thing you can do for a source of information is keep it open.” With that understanding, the Peacock series mixes the conceit of a ‘90s classic into The Copenhagen Test, where everyone is watching and listening. “They begin to build a Truman Show world around him, which is, they assign him a girlfriend, and they start to control his life. Meanwhile, he can only talk to them at certain times when the signal’s blocked. So he starts having this Mr. Robot experience of, ‘What’s real and what’s not?’” That concept emerges more fully once Alexander realizes his eyes and ears have been hacked, and he is broadcasting everything to an unknown enemy. But while the instinctive response might be to shut down or work to sever the connection, he does something far riskier: keep the channel open and perform. Rather than isolating him from society, the Orphanage constructs a version of normal life that they assume can be managed in real time. Alexander is allowed to move freely, fall in love, build routines — but only within parameters shaped by unseen hands. As Brandon explains, “The story starts to diverge into two worlds where we’re following him out in the world, trying to figure out, in the middle of this espionage, and then the other side of the world is this room, basically, which is kind of like NASA mission control.” Alongside The Truman Show, Apollo 13 was a constant reference point in the writers’ room, specifically for the split perspective it offered. “Both have Ed Harris at home in a control room,” Brandon laughs. “That’s what the story is — these two sides trying to figure out how they can trust each other.” Cinematographer Luc Montpellier echoes that framing from a visual standpoint. “You wanted to make it feel like a lot of our sets that Mark Steel designed — our production designer — were very much like these soft boxes that were very much served to monitor what Alexander was doing,” he explains. “You have these two worlds. You’ve got the real world and this artificial world, so when we design the sets, again, I wanted it to feel like you never knew what kind of time it was. Time stood still — and again, contrasting that with the more chaotic kind of light flares and chaos that the real world has. It is a spy thriller, so those two things, I think, needed to contrast each other.” Instead of stylized point-of-view shots or overt visual effects, the show also keeps the audience at a distance from the technology itself, and that restraint is deliberate. “We decided we were never going to cut to that unless we were seeing it on a monitor,” Brandon adds. “It would be really easy to do the ‘hack-o-vision,’ and it just didn’t feel right.” By filtering the surveillance through screens and observers, the series mirrors Alexander’s own experience — always aware of being watched, never quite sure by whom or why.
‘The Copenhagen Test’ Is a Sci-Fi Series That Hits Close to Home
Image via Peacock, NBC Universal
One of the most grounding things about The Copenhagen Test is how it plays with science fiction, aesthetically. There are no holographic figures floating in the air or transparent boards where characters are inputting calculations. Instead, it operates in a space that feels uncomfortably like our own. That was always the intention, as actress Sinclair Daniel, who plays Parker — Alexander’s “handler” — puts it. One of the early descriptions that stuck with her was how the show lives “five minutes in the future,” a phrase that initially confused her. “When I first got the breakdown for it, I was like, ‘What does that mean?’” she recalls. “But then there are little things — the biohacking, the technological elements — where you’re like, does that exist, or is that made up? I don’t know.” That uncertainty is by design. For Brandon, the goal was never to overwhelm the audience with tech jargon or visual shorthand. The danger, in his mind, was tipping the show too far into spectacle. The idea that Alexander’s eyes and ears are being broadcast is treated almost mundanely. It’s horrifying, yes, but it’s not fetishized. As actor Mark O’Brien, who plays Alexander’s rival Cobb, bluntly observes, “Even the hack is not that crazy at some point in the future.” What makes the story really unsettling isn’t the technology, but how nonchalantly everyone around Alexander adapts to it. Jennifer Yale, who co-runs the series with Brandon, describes that kind of condition as essential to the story’s emotional anchor. Rather than pushing the show into a sleek, hyper-digital aesthetic, they leaned into analog textures and lived-in spaces — phones with cords, offices full of paper, rooms that feel resistant to the future pressing in on them. The effect is subtle but cumulative, and that tension between the familiar and the artificial was something Montpellier was thinking about from the very beginning. “It was really important at the beginning of the show that you constantly are wondering what’s real and what’s not,” he says. “So, based on that kind of notion, when it came to the story, it was important that the cinematography and the lighting essentially support that notion, as well.” Rather than showing its surveillance premise through overt visual tricks, he focused on subtle disorientation. Even the Orphanage itself was designed to feel untethered from normal markers of time. “Obviously, we’re sitting in a set here that is underground,” he explains, “but it really was important that we had this illusion that it had its own kind of time and rhythm to it.”
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That philosophy between what’s real and what isn’t extends to how the show differentiates its two worlds. “You have these two worlds,” Montpellier adds. “You’ve got the real world and this artificial world.” Above ground, the lighting is messier, more chaotic, less controlled. Below ground, things become more rigid and intentional. “You still wanted it to feel like it was natural, but maybe the color was slightly off, so you weren’t quite sure if things were real or not.” That unease is by design, with the Orphanage never intending to feel sinister, but rather plausible. Celiana Cárdenas, one of the series’ cinematographers, leaned into that same ambiguity as the story progresses and Alexander begins to question his own perceptions. “The thing that Luc was saying is you’re never sure what is true,” she says. “Is it real? Is it not real? Is he saying the truth? Is he not?” Visually, that uncertainty became part of the language of the show. “We play a lot of reflections,” she explains. “We play a lot with different lenses, angles, and, of course, the lighting, as we progress through the show, starts becoming darker.” Importantly, that darkness isn’t about style for style’s sake. As Alexander’s internal state fractures, so does the visual state around him. “You start seeing how we’re going into a rabbit hole with Alexander’s journey,” Cárdenas says. “But also, as we start going darker, it’s more silhouetted.” Outside the Orphanage, she describes leaning into “chiaroscuro” — not to glamorize the espionage, but to reflect how much of the truth is slipping into shadow. For Liu, that depth was key to how he approached Alexander. “It’s easy to play sci-fi as something heightened,” he explains, “but this doesn’t feel heightened to him. This is his life.” His character isn’t reacting to an unknown world, but rather a small, invasive change that suddenly reframes everything he does.
Why Simu Liu’s Alexander Hale Is the Perfect Lead for This Spy-Fi Thriller
Image via Peacock, NBC Universal
Liu’s Alexander isn’t chosen at random. From the outset, the actor describes him as someone operating at a very high level — and sometimes hitting a ceiling. “Alexander begins the story from a place of extreme competency,” Liu explains, “but also very unfulfilled about where he’s at in his career.” Alexander has proven himself repeatedly, with a background that includes advanced military service, yet he keeps watching others move ahead of him. That frustration isn’t just professional or relatable — it’s existential. He knows what he’s capable of, and yet he can feel the gap between that and how he’s being seen. What makes Alexander such a compelling test case for the Orphanage is that he’s already accustomed to scrutiny. He’s used to being evaluated, questioned, and — as Liu carefully puts it — “passed over.” Early in the pilot, there’s a moment when O’Brien’s Cobb finally says why Alexander hasn’t advanced, and the relief on the character’s face is telling. “It’s nice to hear someone say it out loud for once,” Liu recalls of the scene, noting how often people “tiptoe around and try not to say the wrong thing.” The show doesn’t reduce that moment to a single explanation, but it does acknowledge the quiet weight of constantly having to interpret what’s left unsaid. “It’s something that I definitely feel some sort of kinship to… I think it’s a very universally relatable thing,” he adds. For Brandon, that sense of being watched — and judged — is baked into the character’s DNA. As a first-generation American whose parents were Chinese immigrants, the creator says the series leans into the added burden that comes with that kind of visibility. “Are there extra questions that come about you that you have to prove yourself, that you are American…? There’s this extra step of, ‘Prove your loyalty. Prove you can be trusted.’” That pressure doesn’t exactly start when the hack begins; it’s all already there, but the hack turns it into something literal, constant, and inescapable. It’s why the show’s central performance isn’t framed as a cool spy trick; it’s a survival method blended with a moral problem. Brandon describes how Alexander begins by “taking orders from these people and playing the game,” before the story flips into something more personal: “If I want to save my life, if I want to do this in a way that is actually right, and not just because it’s what America wants me to do, I have to take control in my own hands.” From there, he says the series keeps pressing one question: “Who’s in control here? What is the goal we’re working towards? And where, ultimately, does our allegiance lie?” But while one of the most meta aspects of the show is in how the audience is in on the performance with Alexander, Brandon says the show’s paranoia isn’t just about the truth, but recognizing it. “Now, what’s so much more terrifying to us is this idea that… what if the truth is right in front of me and you can’t tell?” he explains. “So it’s not really a question of, like, ‘What is the truth? Who do you trust?’ But how do you know?” Yale underlines that ambiguity from the other side. “Everyone has a different truth,” she says, adding that even the people behind the hack “all have different agendas, believing that those are the real way to save the country, as well as the world.”
The Most Dangerous Part of ‘The Copenhagen Test’ Isn’t the Hack — It’s the Emotional Engineering
Image via Peacock, NBC Universal
One of the most dangerous variables in The Copenhagen Test isn’t the hack itself, but the intimacy built around it. Once the Orphanage decides to keep Alexander’s surveillance channel open, they don’t just monitor his movements, but they engineer his emotional life by playing with his feelings. For Barrera, who plays Michelle, that’s where the premise tips from unsettling to existential. “The whole thing is that it’s a Truman Show, right?” she says plainly. “She is his girlfriend, so she’s on camera. Her face is now known by the enemy.” In theory, that visibility should burn Michelle forever. “This could be her last mission. This could be her freedom,” Barrera adds. “So this is very high stakes for her. She needs to nail this job.” But Michelle’s job isn’t simply to blend in, but to perform a manipulative kind of affection that convinces Alexander just enough for him to never suspect a thing. Barrera describes the role as deeply restrictive and strangely freeing at the same time, especially because so much of Michelle’s backstory remains opaque even to her. “I’ve never done something like this before where it’s very restricting,” she explains, “but it’s also at the same time very freeing because I can kind of fill a lot of the blanks.” That duality carries into how Michelle approaches Alexander. “She’s a pro. She’s a professional,” Barrera says. “There are no limits. She’s committed.” But even with commitment, in this context, it isn’t romance as it’s more of a strategy. Michelle knows exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to maintain trust, even as her own exit from life depends on how believable she is. Watching that relationship take shape from a distance is Parker, played by Daniel, the architect of the entire illusion. Parker never interacts with Alexander directly. But she scripts his dates, studies his past relationships, and shapes Michelle’s approach based on patterns and preferences. Daniel likens it to something uncomfortably familiar. “It’s pretty parasocial,” she admits with a laugh. “When it’s a one-sided thing, you get to define what the relationship is.” Over time, Parker’s attachment blurs into something more possessive. “You are my creation. You are my baby,” Daniel says of Parker’s mindset. “You can do no wrong.” But that emotional danger isn’t just that Parker cares — it’s that she starts to believe she knows Alexander better than he knows himself. For Liu, that layered performance — being in a relationship while unknowingly faking it — becomes one of the show’s quiet pressure points. He describes scenes where every interaction carries very ambiguous meanings, depending on who knows what in the room. “It’s easy to get caught in the different layers,” he says of an awareness that causes tension between the characters. “Alexander would act a certain way if nobody was watching, but if Alexander knew that someone was watching, how would he act?”
How ‘The Copenhagen Test’ Keeps Its Action Grounded and Brutal
Image via Peacock, NBC Universal
If The Copenhagen Test treats surveillance as a kind of psychological theater, the action sequences are where that performance has the potential to collapse under physical pressure. Once the characters are in motion, there’s no room for ambiguity. Stunt coordinator James Mark says the mandate from the start was to keep everything firmly planted in the show’s action elements, even when the stakes escalated. When comparing Liu’s experience in stunts with Shang-Chi, Mark admits the Marvel film is all “supernatural, superpowers.” But this, as he explains, “is a bit more (of a) grounded, thriller, spy, so we just try to err more on realistic than anything else, and less East Asian martial arts… and more grounded with, like, military combat.” With action not exactly designed to impress, Mark hints it’s more designed to convince the audience of the situation these characters are coming up against. “With TV, the difficulty is always that you’re up against the clock,” he says. “You don’t have days on end like in a movie… but television is very cinematic these days. It’s almost like watching a feature film every time we watch an episode.” Every fight had to be built to survive tight schedules without losing its sense of danger. That meant choreography that actors could execute repeatedly without injury, while still selling the idea that these moments could end someone’s life. For Barrera, Michelle spends the series weaponizing intimacy; the fights are an extension of the same deception. “If she wanted to kill him, she could do so very quickly. And she doesn’t. Because they’re watching. She has to make it look like she’s doing it.” That tension shaped how she also approached the physicality itself. “I’ve never done so much hand-to-hand combat, honestly,” she admits, noting how much time she spent training compared to other roles. Rather than leaning into brute force, Michelle’s fighting style reflects survival instincts. “I’m an elbow girl,” Barrera says. “Hitting someone with this part of your body… this is not going to hurt me.”
The show’s action didn’t just require choreography, but an environment that can hold violence, surveillance, and emotional pressure at the same time. Executive producer Mark Winemaker describes the process of adjusting sets based on how they actually behaved on camera for the overall vibe to feel authentic. “They filmed it the first time, and we watched the footage, and we’re like, ‘Hmm.’ So we added picture lights, and we added lights in the shower,” he says. In a series he flatly describes as “really dark,” lighting became part of the storytelling infrastructure. “The lighting, nowadays especially, is mostly all set deck lighting. We do all this LED that’s in these coves,” he explains — a design choice that allows the camera to carve contrast without flattening the space. When the performance turns physical, the world doesn’t suddenly change; it was built from the start to withstand impact.
A System That Believes It’s Right Is a Scary Thing to Recognize
What ultimately makes The Copenhagen Test unsettling isn’t the technology, or even the surveillance — but the certainty behind it. No one inside the Orphanage believes what they’re doing is evil. Instead, they believe they’re being careful and calculated, while deeming it all as responsible. That kind of conviction is what allows the system to function without ever seeing itself as cruel. Winemaker points out that this mindset was built directly into the physical spaces of the show. “It’s meant to feel operational,” he explains. “These aren’t villain lairs. These are rooms where people sit and work all day.” That normalcy is intentional, he says. From the desks to the lighting and furniture, nothing signals danger. “If it feels too dramatic,” he adds, “you stop believing that people would make these choices every day.” For Yale, that institutional calm is what makes the series emotionally volatile. The characters inside the system don’t see themselves as manipulators, but stewards. “Everyone thinks they’re acting for the greater good,” she says. “They’re making compromises they believe are justified.” While the show never asks the audience to agree or disagree, it does make them sit with the discomfort of how easy that justification becomes once a structure supports it. Brandon takes that idea one step further, framing the series as less about espionage and more about authorship. “The real question isn’t who’s lying,” he explains. “It’s who gets to decide what version of reality everyone else has to live in.” In that sense, The Copenhagen Test isn’t driven by secrets so much as authority. Especially in who controls information, who shapes behavior, and who absorbs the consequences when that control fractures. Naturally, that fracture lands hardest on Alexander. For Liu, his character’s arc isn’t about overthrowing the system, but more so reclaiming authorship of his own identity within it. “He’s constantly being interpreted by other people,” Liu says. “What he wants is agency — not to be managed, not to be explained, not to be reduced to a problem someone else is solving.” But O’Brien frames his character, Cobb, as the one person in the building who can’t accept that kind of operational shrug. “Ultimately, I am out for the truth,” he says, adding how frustrating it is watching red flags appear in plain sight while everyone acts like it’s fine. “We cannot have any red flags in here. We can’t have any errors, and something huge is occurring.” In Cobb’s mind, ignoring it means negligence, but O’Brien also notes the irony in how the more moral Cobb tries to be, the less socially survivable his character really is. “He’s never going to make friends with anyone at the rate he’s going.” Cobb’s refusal to look away doesn’t read as heroism, but more as a disruption. Yale frames that kind of institutional self-justification as the emotional fuse of the series: “Everyone thinks they’re acting for the greater good… They’re making compromises they believe are justified.” But once that mindset hardens, Brandon argues the danger isn’t just a single lie, but the authority to manufacture normal. “The real question isn’t who’s lying,” he says. “It’s who gets to decide what version of reality everyone else has to live in.” The Copenhagen Test premieres on December 27 on Peacock.
Release Date
December 27, 2025
Network
Peacock
Directors
Jet Wilkinson
Publicado: 2025-12-22 17:15:00
fonte: collider.com
