Can Simu Liu Pass ‘The Copenhagen Test’? Our Classified Intel on Your Next Spy Obsession

Paranoia, espionage, and tech collide in this twisty thriller starring Marvel hero Simu Liu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) as Alexander Hale, an intelligence analyst who discovers that an unnamed enemy has hacked his body and now has access to everything he sees and hears. As you can see from the just-dropped trailer for Peacock’s upcoming thriller The Copenhagen Test, things go from bad to worse faster than you can say, “Alias meets The Agency.”

“It’s the question of ‘What are the things we’re paranoid about right now?'” asks Thomas Brandon, the series’ creator and co-showrunner with fellow EP Jennifer Yale. “I was worried about my phone and my laptop being hacked, and so I thought, ‘OK, what’s the next step in the future? Five minutes in the future of that?” And I thought, ‘OK, the eyes.'”

Christos Kalohoridis / Peacock

With that idea in place, Brandon then set out to I.D. the worst person in the world to get hacked and came up with Liu’s relatively unassuming Alexander.

“I started thinking about this low-level intelligence officer who’s hunting for a mole within his agency, [who] slowly starts to realize, ‘It’s me. I’m the only one that looked at all these files!’ He figures out that he’s been hacked.’ And then because I’m a fan of John Le Carré and that kind of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy espionage world world, the smartest thing you can do for a source of information is keep it open. So what he does is he signals to his bosses without letting on to whomever’s watching [him].”

Christos Kalohoridis / Peacock

After covertly alerting his bosses to his compromised position, “they begin to build a Truman Show world around him” to suss out the infiltrators, continues Brandon, who has filled the story with high-octane action sequences, innumerable reveals and a cast of characters played by Melissa Barrera (Scream 6), Brian D’Arcy James (Spotlight) and Mark O’Brien (City on a Hill).

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We don’t want to spill too much on how each of them factors into Alexander’s investigation (don’t trust everything you hear from them in this trailer!), but according to Yale, even the baddies think they’re fighting the good fight.

“Everyone has a different truth,” she says. “The people behind the hack all have different agendas, believing that those are the real ways to save the country, as well as the world.”