Is Hulu’s ‘The Veil’ Based on a True Story?

Next week, audiences will have a new thriller to savor when The Veil‘s first two episodes hit Hulu. The show looks to offer some more thrilling drama work from its highly decorated lead Elisabeth Moss, including a convincing British accent, some intense fighting sequences (at least one stunt caused Moss to fracture two of her vertebrae), and a chameleonic array of character faces. But is this new international spy series based on a true story?

Here’s a look at what we know about the show so far.

Is The Veil based on a true story?

While some elements of the story are certainly plucked from real life — for example, Western worries about the potential for terrorist attacks and inter-agency disagreements — The Veil is an original story written by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders). So no, it is not based on a true story.

The concept, however, came from executive producer Denise Di Novi, who revealed that she got the idea of incorporating France’s Directorate-General for External Security into the story from a conversation with a retired French agent. At the Television Critics Association winter tour, Di Novi explained, “The French organization, the DGSE, is the most closed, most intensely private [organization], and I don’t think this ever would have happened if I hadn’t been in a hotel bar and a retired DGSE agent… started talking to me, telling me about how difficult it is that they had to start working with other agencies and how much they didn’t like it.”

Per Knight, this led to the idea to serialize the “friction between the various intelligence agencies MI6, DGSE, and the CIA in dealing with new threats,” and he interviewed people associated with certain agencies. “There is friction, and there is tension, and the thing that appeals to me most is when big international conflicts or events boil down to individuals. And what I wanted to do with this is take huge issues and boil it down to two people in a car,” Knight said.

What is The Veil about?

The miniseries stars Elisabeth Moss as an experienced undercover MI6 agent named Imogen Salter, who is sent to the Turkish border to hunt down a Syrian woman, Adilah (Yumna Marwan), who’s suspected of being involved in an ISIS terrorist plot. As they make their way to Paris, Salter begins to question everything and everyone. Per the series’ logline, these two will “play a deadly game of truth and lies on the road from Istanbul to Paris and London. One woman has a secret, the other a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost.”

As seen in the series’ trailer above, Salter will be facing foes from all over. The logline continues, “In the shadows, mission controllers at the CIA and French DGSE must put differences aside and work together to avert potential disaster.”

Moss told critics at TCA that she found the role to be “more challenging” than anything she’d done so far, including her star-making hit series The Handmaid’s Tale. “It was much more challenging than I’ve ever experienced given the different skills and different things I had to do with the dialect, the stunts, fight training, and speaking a couple of different languages here and there, and then traveling around the world,” she revealed. “As far as the accent, I worked on it probably harder than I’ve worked on anything… There is a fair amount of pressure when it comes to that kind of thing and I didn’t want to be thinking about it and I wanted to do the material justice.”

Related

Hulu's 25 Best Original Series, Ranked

Who else is involved with The Veil? 

The series also stars Josh Charles as Max, a CIA officer who’s assigned to serve as the American liaison for Salter, as well as Dali Benssalah as a French Algerian handler (and a lover of Imogen’s) Malik Amar, Haluk Bilginer, Alec Secareanu as Emir, Thibault de Montalembert, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, James Purefoy as Michael, Joana Ribeiro, Phill Langhorne, Dan Wyllie, and Aron von Andrian.

The series is produced by Moss and created by Knight, who wrote all six episodes of the series. Daina Reed directed the first three, and Damon Thomas helmed the final stretch.

Will there be a second season of The Veil?

The Veil is currently being promoted as a limited series, but Knight did leave the door open for a continuation of the spy story. At TCA, the creator responded to the question of whether there could be more stories about the international adventures of Imogen Salter, and he emphatically said, “Absolutely.” So, even though the show is currently limited at just a half dozen episodes, don’t count out a potential The Veil Season 2 just yet.

The Veil‘s first two episodes will debut on Hulu on April 30, and each of the remaining four episodes will be released each week (on Tuesdays) until May 28.

The Veil, April 30, Hulu