‘The Copenhagen Test’: How Simu Liu & Melissa Barrera Prepped for That Nasty Episode 7 Brawl (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Copenhagen Test Season 1, Episode 7, “Not the World of Men.”]

Most couples bicker. Some even get nasty. On The Copenhagen Test, they go HAM.

In the seventh episode of Peacock’s spy-tech thriller, intelligence agent Alexander Hale (Simu Liu) — who has been trying to smoke out the people responsible for hacking his brain with the help of fake-slash-maybe real love interest-slash-operative Michelle (Melissa Barrera) — gets a good look at just how far his bosses at the off-the-books Orphanage division will go to protect their assets.

“We’ve been watching Melissa and Simu’s characters kind of be assigned to fall in love,” series creator Thomas Brandon told us on the show’s Toronto set last March. “But then, are they really having feelings?” If they were, they may be erased by what goes down during the hour.

“This moment that is so great at the end of Episode 6 is Melissa is sitting there chopping vegetables in the kitchen [and] she gets the text to kill him,” he continues. “She added this thing that was so great, which is she just wiped her knife and went. And so it’s like it’s cold. And so that’s where this episode picks up, which she just comes after him with the knife. So it’s kind of a surprise for the audience because we think the story is like, ‘This woman is too in love to do her job.’ And now it’s like, ‘Oh, no, she’s good at her job and maybe she has feelings but it doesn’t matter. She’s going to do her job.'”

Christos Kalohoridis/Peacock)

“She’s been ordered to kill him and if she doesn’t, she’ll and she could die,” adds Brandon’s co-showrunner Jennifer Yale. “And we think Alexander’s character thought maybe she’s on his side, so this won’t happen. And so there’s a little bit of surprise and there’s definitely connection between the two of them. But Alexander realizes very quickly, ‘If I want to survive, I have to get out of this.'”

What follows in the opening moments of Episode 7 is a meticulously designed and particularly brutal throwdown between Liu and Barrera that incorporates the training they’d be consistently enduring throughout production. “Fortunately, this isn’t the first fight scene they’ve done together or been a part of,” stunt coordinator James Mark notes on the day of the sequence’s filming. “So they have a little bit of understanding of each other’s movements.”

James and his brother Chris, who served as the show’s fight coordinator, paid close attention to each of the characters’ backgrounds to add an authenticity to the physicality. And they weren’t the only ones putting in the work.

“I have to say, I think that the most exciting thing about getting to approach this role is getting to work with firearms,” Liu admits only hours before he and Barrera are about to destroy a bathroom and kitchen set. “It’s not something that growing up as a Canadian we have a whole lot of exposure to, and I was very fascinated by it.”

He adds, “And then the other part was kind of crafting how Alexander moves as a hand-to-hand fighter, which of course is very different than something like Shang-Chi. It was funny, I was working with Chris and James and we would be going through choreography and then we’d all kind of stop ourselves at the same time to be like, ‘That feels like a Shang-Chi move. It doesn’t feel like an Alexander Hale move.'”

For his part, Liu looked at the MCMAP fighting styles of the Special Forces to both inform Hale’s skill set and separate his performance from what audience might expect from his action in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“Usually, it has to do with certain extensions,” he goes on. “Anytime we roundhouse-kicked someone, we’d be like, ‘Oh, is that too martial artsy? Is that what someone would truly do with Special Forces training?’ It is a lot of elbows, because everything has got to be very, very close and very guarded, and it’s also got to be maximum impact, maximum amount of pain inflicted. So there’s something very brutalist about it, very utilitarian about the way that Alexander moves.”

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Barrera, on the other hand, came at the Episode 7 sequence with a grittier, street-ier style befitting someone who has had a rough road in this wildly violent world of espionage.

“She’s a little bit ruthless,” agrees the Abigail badass. “Obviously, there’s technique because she is trained, but I don’t think that she was trained in the military. I think she was trained somewhere else.” In fact, during rehearsals, Barrera asked the Mark brothers how they could style Michelle’s fighting so that “anyone that knows about martial arts can catch a certain move and be like, ‘Whoa, that’s not an army training!'”

“It was something that occurred to me later on [in filming] where I was like, ‘Can we just make her [seem] that maybe she trained somewhere in Asia so she has a different style that is less military and less what you would see of men?’ Because I have to be realistic…I’m a woman and as much as I’m very much like, ‘Men and women can do the same things!’ the reality is that biologically, men are stronger. So I always try to be very cognizant of what I can actually do that is going to help me win a fight against a man that is bigger than me, heavier than me, stronger than me.”

Due to Liu’s demanding filming schedule, as well as his role as exec producer, he wasn’t always available to spar with Barrera before cameras rolled. Thankfully, “Simu has a deeper background in martial arts,” says James Mark. “My brother and I have worked with him previously for a long time so we know him and we did have some time earlier in the season. So we kind of know how he operates, what he can and can do, and what he’s comfortable with.”

That meant Barrera would often rehearse with stunt performers and Simu’s stunt double simply to “get her the muscle memory,” says James Mark, raving that Barrera’s off-camera commitment added an extra layer to her on-screen work. “We’d do a lot of reps with her and the stunt doubles, get her energy up and…just make sure she knows the choreography to a point where she’s not thinking about it.” Once action was called, he states, she was then free to “add in her performance, right? So it’s very similar to learning dialogue and then becoming the character.”

At the same time, the Marks are mapping out every little detail in order to best serve the actors’ efforts. “We’ll actually shoot the entire fight, shot-for-shot, in ways that look the most cinematic,” reveals Chris Mark. “Then we’ll edit a video in our facility, present that to the director and get their input.”

That way, he offers, they can troubleshoot anything even before the first punch is thrown “as opposed to trying to figure that out on the day. And by doing that, we can come up with a lot more cinematic shots and help sell the energy of things that are a bit more choreographed.”

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And while the show does have that big-budget feel and look, the siblings were very aware that they had to deliver the goods with a decidedly non-theatrical schedule.

“This fight for example, we don’t even have a second unit day for it,” James Mark divulges with a well-earned pride. “You have to do it within a day, but you still want to have a good result, you want to have a nice product, you want it to be slick.”

“And you know, fights on TV aren’t what they used to be, right? Television is very cinematic these days, it’s almost like watching a feature film every time you watch an episode,” he continues. “So that kind of standard is what people are expecting and throughout the season, we definitely learned how to pivot, move quickly, and create things that could realistically be shot within a 10 or 11-hour day and still look good.”

So, in a way, they had to roll with the punches, too.

The Copenhagen Test, Streaming Now, Peacock