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Ever since her early days in movies like Cheaper by the Dozen and her big break, Coyote Ugly, Piper Perabo has been the girl next door. Now she’ll become the spy next door with her starring role in the new USA Network show Covert Affairs, premiering tomorrow night. In the show, Piper plays Annie Walker, a rookie CIA agent with a knack for languages whose short-lived passionate love affair with an exotic stranger on a South Asian beach may come back to haunt her. She’s guided through her daily agency duties by blind agent Auggie, played by Ugly Betty‘s Christopher Gorham, and she butts heads with bosses played by Peter Gallagher and Kari Matchett. And after work, she comes home to the guest house behind her sister’s house, and she navigates a tricky relationship with her family filled with lies and deception to keep her CIA work a secret.
Last week, Piper took a moment from shooting Covert Affairs in Toronto to talk to reporters about the show, it’s inevitable comparison to that other female spy show, Alias, and what training — fight training and otherwise — she did before taking on this very challenging role.
Do you think the comparison to Alias will help or hinder Covert Affairs?
When I first got working on the show and I was speaking to actor friends of mine about what the show was about and how I was going to create the character, people said, “You should watch Alias.” I had never watched the show, don’t ask me how I missed it, so I got the pilot and I watched the pilot and I thought it was genius. I didn’t really want to watch anymore because I don’t want to in any way imitate what [Jennifer Garner] was doing and I want to make sure that Annie is her own woman and dealing with her own world. But I thought that what I saw of the work on that pilot was really exciting and the fight sequences were really dynamic and she was just a really powerful, smart, intuitive woman who can make decisions on the fly, she’s brave, and she’s still a real person. I think those parallels can be drawn to Annie.
I think in our show, though, you see a lot more of the real life of a spy, what kind of car you drive and what it’s like when you get home at night after you’ve just been chasing an assassin all day. So in that way I think we are really different. I think that if people come and watch our show because they like Alias, then that’s great, but I think they’re going to get to see a much bigger world than they saw and so hopefully they’ll keep watching.
