00:00Avery Thompson, Hollywood Life. Elizabeth, you know, you are so busy, you have so many different roles.
00:05What was it about Imogen that was particularly intriguing to you?
00:09I've always wanted to do something in the spy genre, but this was like that times a hundred.
00:18Because Imogen is, you know, so many different people.
00:22And the person that you meet at the beginning is the different person from the one you meet ten minutes later
00:28to the different person that you'll meet at the second episode, and so on and so forth.
00:32So for me, it was like this opportunity to get to play ten characters in one project, you know.
00:40And when it came my way, the headlines were FX, Stephen Knight, and Denise Tenovi.
00:46And I was like, well, it's going to be good.
00:50It's probably going to be a good project and a good script.
00:53And then it just was, I remember talking to my agents and manager and just being like,
00:58I don't think this is something I can say no to.
01:01Like, I think I'll regret this if I say no.
01:04Did you have to do a lot of training to play an MI6 agent?
01:07I did.
01:07The biggest thing was the dialect.
01:09So I did about six months of dialect work.
01:11And then I started training a couple months out.
01:15I started, like, physically getting in shape before that.
01:17But, like, I started doing stunt training and fight training in Paris as part of our prep.
01:23And then just continued in Turkey and continued throughout the process of just, we had three big fights to learn.
01:29And so I just kept whenever we could on the weekends, like, just trying to train as much as I could.
01:36Denise, you know, this is an international show on a very global scale.
01:41How did you just sort of decide where the playing fields would be?
01:43Steve has, Steve Knight, the creator, has a personal connection.
01:49He has family from Turkey.
01:51And it made sense for the story because Turkey and Syria and, you know, these countries are the areas where there's a huge influx of these camps where the story begins.
02:03So, and we, but we wanted to shoot in an area of Turkey that you had never seen before.
02:08So we shot in these mountains in central Turkey that have never been shot and rarely even photographed.
02:14I mean, they're really in the middle of nowhere and extremely challenging to get to.
02:18So that sounded exciting to us.
02:21And it was exciting, but it was more difficult than we anticipated.
02:24And, you know, we did know we wanted a lot of the story to take place in Paris and have the French intelligence kind of be the nexus of the story of these other agencies all trying to work together, the CIA and the, you know, the MI6, trying to work together with the French and all the conflict and chaos that comes with that.
02:45So we knew we wanted to shoot in France and then we knew that we wanted the story to then wrap up in the UK.
02:53Awesome.
02:53You know, we get a lot of spy shows, you know, I feel like we've had, you know, several over the years, but this is very much like a two-hander and a very, like, claustrophobic, almost intimate kind of situation.
03:02What was it like to sort of build that tension on this sort of road trip from hell maybe a little bit sort of?
03:09Yeah, it's funny because it didn't feel, I mean, to us, because we traveled so much and we shot in so many different places, even in central Turkey, we would be shooting an hour to this way or an hour that way.
03:22We shot so many different places, even in the UK, you know, and not just London.
03:28Like, we just, it was, so we were all over the place the whole time.
03:31I saw neighborhoods in Paris that I would have never gotten to see.
03:35Like, it just was, so it felt to us like not that at all.
03:41It felt, you know, intimate in a character way for sure.
03:44But, I mean, I'm used to doing, you know, something where you're in one city for six months.
03:49Right.
03:49You know, even if that city's New Zealand, you know, it's, or that country's New Zealand.
03:53And it's just, so for me, it felt like we were constantly moving, constantly packing, constantly unpacking, you know, the amount of just like hotels and cars was a lot.
04:06Yeah.
04:07I know you're an executive producer on this, you know, and The Handmaid's Tale is also very much a pressure cooker of a show.
04:12You know, did you learn or take anything away from that experience, you know, in creating this sort of very different world of danger, but also equally dangerous?
04:20You mean, did I take something from Handmaid's into The Veil or vice versa?
04:24Into The Veil.
04:24I think the thing that was so different about The Veil was the international nature of it.
04:30The, the, as an executive producer working with so many different languages, working between so many different countries, having constantly on set and off set people just having different ways of working and having to sort of bring all those people together and have one conversation was the, was a, was a challenge.
04:49Everyone did it so beautifully and we were very lucky to have a fantastic French production team and a fantastic Turkish production team and UK, but it just, it was a lot of coordination.
05:00So that was definitely something that as an EP, as a producer guided by Denise, I learned so much about and I'm hoping to be able to take into the future.
05:10But I would, I would like to say Elizabeth's experience on Handmaid's and all the other things she's done was so valuable to me personally and to the show.
05:19You know, she truly is a, you know, phenomenal producer and really the, her breadth of knowledge is tremendous as a director, as a producer, as an actor.
05:30It was just wonderful to have that as, you know, in, in the partnership.
05:36Thank you so much for taking the time.
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