“Over lunch, she said, for the past 35 years, I've been an MI6 agent,” Steven Knight recounted about a story that inspired the new series The Veil. It was one of those “I know a guy who knows a guy” kind of tales, but it began an idea about how he life of a secret agent. Who really knows them? How do they maintain their sense of self? In the case of this annecdote, it was the agents retirement luncheon when she was finally able to tell her family what she really did for her career.
(Frank Micelotta/PictureGroup for FX Networks)
“The genesis was an idea from Denise [Di Novi, executive producer], who suggested that there was friction between the various intelligence agencies, MI6, GSE, and CIA, in dealing with new threats.” The Veil follows an MI6 agent who is tasked by the DGSE to transport a presumed terrorist back to Paris, a mission that gets trickier when the CIA gets involved. “To research it, I went to Paris. I met three people who worked in French intelligence. Two of them were DGSE, two of them were non-attributable, and I just asked them what's going on; what are the stories because I always find that the true stories are much more compelling. So I heard some stories, as one does. As a dramatist, you take this character—sometimes you weld them together, sometimes you take one story and join it to another. But it felt, to me, as if there's something going on, and there is friction, and there is tension. The thing that appeals to me most is when big, big, big international conflicts, events, boil down to individuals. What I wanted to do with this was to take huge issues and boil it down to two people in a car driving through the snow, and the nature of the conversation affects the outcome for thousands of people.”
Driving that car is Star and executive producer Elisabeth Moss. “I'm a huge fan of the spy genre,” Moss shared during the TCA Winter Press Tour. “I have always wanted to play a spy. An MI-6 spy has an extra bit of glamor to it which I was really excited about. I did a lot of research beforehand; just reading a lot of books, any kind of female spy book I could get, I tried to read. But the thing about spies is they don’t necessarily always want to talk to you about what they do. So, it's actually quite difficult to find them and get them to talk to you and tell you their secrets for obvious reasons.”
Josh Charles, who plays the lone American character Max Peterson, was one of the few actors with a secret agent connection he could lean on.“[Our technical advisor] connected me with someone from the CIA and I had some other connections here in the U.S. from some other CIA contacts,” Charles explained. “But the gentleman that I was connected with, we spoke and we actually got to have dinner when he was coming through Paris. He's not in the CIA anymore, but we were able to talk and go through the script and just pick his brain about things, trying to find little behavior, little details. So much of it was there in the script already. But it is fun to talk to the real people that do this and see what the stakes are.”
“It’s really hard to meet the MI6 but it's too hard to meet the DGSE,” added Dali Benssalah, who plays DGSE agent Malik Ama. “For me, the research is really in the script. We said the scripts are so detailed and intricate that you know so much about your character just by looking at the page. So, it was more than enough for me.”
As writer and Steven Knight explained, part of the inspiration for The Veil was information shared with him by executive producer Denise Di Novie about in-fighting between government intelligence agencies. “The DGSE is the most closed, the most intensely private,” Denise explained. “I don’t think this would've ever happened if I hadn't been in a hotel bar and a retired DGSE agent was drinking too much, had too many drinks, and started talking to me and telling me these things about how difficult it was that they had to start working with other agencies and how much they didn’t like it. That was just kind of a strange fluke.”
Fluke or not, FX’s global limited series The Veil launched today on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ in other territories. Dive into the first two episodes now, with new episodes streaming on Tuesdays for the next five weeks.