‘The Veil’: Elisabeth Moss on Playing a Spy & Doing Stunts Herself (VIDEO)

“Part of being a spy is being a shapeshifter,” Elisabeth Moss told us when she and executive producer Denise di Novi stopped by TV Insider’s interview suite at the Television Critics Association press tour to discuss their new spy thriller, The Veil, written by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders).

Being able to slip into different identities is something Moss could relate to in her character, fearless British MI6 agent Imogen Salter. “She’s all these different people, and when she’s being that person, she’s not lying. She’s telling the truth. She’s an actor. I know exactly who this person is.”

Salter is trying to stop a terrorist attack on a major American city and must get information from Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan), who could just be the world’s most dangerous woman. Their game of cat and mouse plays out from Istanbul to Paris to London. “They start out with their roles. I’m the spy, she’s the asset, and I’m going to try to get her to this place and get information out of her. It gets so much more complicated, and they end up finding that they have a lot more in common than they thought,” Moss says.

Salter’s unconventional methods make for gripping drama, but they test the patience of her colleagues in the intelligence community, CIA higher-up Max Peterson (Josh Charles) and French DGSE agent Malik Amar (Dali Benssalah).

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The series is action packed, and Moss did many of the sequences herself. (Di Novi reveals that the actress even broke two vertebrae during an Istanbul rooftop fight scene, which had to be shot again after she healed.) “A lot of [the action] was me on this because it needed to feel visceral, and you needed to really see who it was. We designed it so I could do it. We didn’t put things in that I wasn’t going to be able to do,” Moss says. “It was challenging, I’m not going to lie. I am not a trained fighter or a spy. So it was definitely hard, but it was so fun. She’s so fun and so cool and interesting. I kind of want to be her.”

To hear more from Moss and Di Novi, watch the full video above.

The Veil, Series Premiere (two episodes), Tuesday, April 30, Hulu