‘CIA’ Boss Explains Bill’s Father’s Secret & Sasha Roiz’s Role

After the season-long mole hunt mystery to kick off the first season, CIA gets a bit more personal with the ongoing story it introduces in the premiere of its sophomore run. Bill (Nick Gehlfuss), still reeling from his father’s death, finds out something about him, courtesy of his partner Colin (Tom Ellis) that changes everything he thought he knew. TV Insider spoke with showurnner Mike Weiss about that and more. Warning: Spoilers for the CIA Season 2 premiere ahead! 

While going through his father’s things, Bill finds an airline ticket to Georgia (the country, not the state) from 1998. His mother assumes he was just consulting after the army. Bill then tells Colin about it, and the CIA officer goes to their boss, Nikki (Necar Zadegan), about Project Palomar. It’s a dark stain on all of them, she says. Once Colin reads the file, he immediately brings in Bill. Bill’s father, Robert Goodman, was CIA. Colin assures him they’ll figure out what it means together.

“Once Bill finds out the big secret that’s going to change how he sees who he is and that there’s a whole mystery there to be unpacked, I think the most important part of the season premiere is that Colin tells him, ‘Hey, we’re going to figure it out together,'” Weiss said. “This mystery that they’re going to investigate, they are going to do it together, and it’s going to completely change the way Bill sees himself, his career as an FBI agent, his mission as a member of the fusion cell, his relationship with Colin even. We’re really excited about telling the story and expanding our understanding of who Bill is and getting him to question what does make him tick.”

Elsewhere in the episode, the fusion cell discovers that an assassin, Felix Vincente (Sasha Roiz), who has killed CIA operatives and many others, is tied to their case involving dirty DEA agents. Felix’s greatest skill is convincing the world he didn’t exist … and now the fusion cell is after him because he escapes after Bill pursues him. His “I’m ready for this, are you?” to the FBI agent is certainly interesting…

Below, showrunner Mike Weiss breaks down that major reveal about Bill’s father, teases the ongoing Felix Vincente storyline, and reveals what’s connected this season (spoiler: everything?!).

Bill’s dad was in the CIA. Why have that be the mystery to kick off the season like the mole in the first?

Mike Weiss: It felt like a way to fundamentally alter Bill’s understanding of his family and his dad who he held up as a hero, and then for him to realize that on some level, he and Colin, by the end of this long journey that they’re going to go on to get to the bottom of this, are more similar in ways that he couldn’t have possibly predicted when they first met. So if your dad was CIA and your new best friend who you love and hate in equal measure, Colin, is also CIA, I mean, it’s almost as if we’re saying on some level, these two are brothers. This is a story about two people who find each other as adults, and on some deep level, they really are brothers more even than just friends and colleagues. And so I don’t know exactly what idea came in what order in terms of how we wanted to tell that part of the story, but it felt like a way to link these two guys in a really, hopefully surprising way.

Mark Schafer/CBS

Speaking of, Lalo thinks that Bill is CIA at one point. Is that also speaking to how Bill is changing with his time on the task force?

For sure. He’s embracing what he’s going to discover was a family lineage that he didn’t know he had.

With everything that Bill learned about his dad, how much are we going to see him able to continue to grieve that loss, who his dad was to him?

I think it’s more that he’s going to be grieving his understanding of who his dad was. He thought his dad was a former military man who was dedicated to his family and was honest and loyal and truthful and the type of man Bill wanted to be. That’s the image of the type of man that Bill always aspired to be. And when he discovers that his dad was shadowy and dangerous and involved in really murky operations that spanned the globe, I think he’s going to put grieving his dad on hold because on some level he doesn’t really know the man that he’s grieving to begin with and he’s got to figure out who that guy was. And once he does that, maybe he can grieve for him properly.

How is Bill going to be handling this news going forward? What does this investigation look like? Are they going to Nikki or are they keeping it from Nikki? 

They trust Nikki. Nikki didn’t know that Bill’s father was an intelligence officer, but because it’s a TV show, I think people get that things are going to connect.

So, this assassin escapes at the end of the season premiere. Is it possible that that assassin had a deep and complicated relationship with Bill’s father back when Bill was an intelligence officer? It’s possible. And so in hunting for the truth about Bill’s dad and who he was and what he did to keep Americans safe, there’s going to be no way to get to the bottom of that for Bill unless he locates and apprehends this international assassin, Felix Vincente, who is played by Sasha Roiz, who is one of our absolute favorite actors that we’ve ever worked with. We’re psyched about how the story is going to unfold.

I did have a question if there was a connection.

It’s a TV show. Why wouldn’t there be?

I love Sasha in the role, but how often are we going to be seeing him, and is this the season-long arc? Is this the first half?

I will spoil that we’re going to get to the bottom of this and understand every little aspect of who Bill’s dad really was and what he did by the end of our fall season, so meaning by the end of Episode 10. Those are all of the episodes that air before our Christmas winter hiatus.

Related

'CIA': Tom Ellis Says Colin & Bill Are Both Spiraling in Season 2

And how often are we going to be seeing Sasha?

We’re going to see Sasha a few more times in some really consequential episodes, especially as we get to kind of climax of the story. He’s going to be in a bunch of episodes — 6, 7, 8, 10, like that.

So, speaking of connections, is going after him where Toni (Angela Sarafyan) will come in?

Well, it’s a TV show, so why wouldn’t Toni be involved in the hunt for Felix Vincente? And so that was a way for us to dovetail everything that Colin’s going through, everything that Bill is going through, Bill’s dad, his past, this assassin. We tried really hard to see, how can we turn all of this into one delicious deep dish pizza?

Speaking of that — because there was this expression that Nikki had when Colin left her office and she got a little serious — was that her just realizing, I’m not telling him about Toni? 

So, at the heart of this relationship between Bill’s dad and this assassin, there’s a CIA operation that took place in the former Soviet Georgia, 25 years ago. And so when Colin comes asking for details about Operation Palomar, she’s just nervous because she knows that that is, as she says, a dark stain on the CIA. And we’re also going to learn a little bit about how Nikki also connects with that operation when she was a younger intelligence officer in the field.

With Bill finding out his dad was CIA, likely didn’t tell his mom, let’s assume, or that’s probably a question for Bill to try to figure out, and it’s not something he can just come out and ask his mom about, is that going to play into how Bill feels about the fact that Katie (Caroline Pluta) doesn’t know about his job change?

He’s going to have to come clean to Katie. He’s going to have to come clean with his mom at some point and explain what he found. Did she ever have suspicions? What did she know? All of these are questions that we’re going to deal with over the course of the first 10 episodes.

Speaking of Bill’s love life, you introduced Lauren played by Molly Griggs last season, there’s a thing there possibly. Are we going to see her again?

We are definitely going to see her again at some point this season, and we like the idea of Bill being a man who eventually is going to have some decisions to make, and they’re not all going to be his decisions. The women in his life get to make decisions, too. I mean, the question for him is, what is his fiancée going to do with the fact that he’s been lying to her for months about the type of work he’s doing, the increased danger that is inherent in this work, et cetera? We wanted to be able to play with all of these dynamics and the fact that he did have this brief fling with this now prosecutor in his past.

I will say that I’m glad that you had Colin tell Bill as soon as he got that confirmation of the file and everything, and it’s not like, “Oh, let’s have the secret,” but did you ever consider having Colin not tell him right away, or had they come too far last season to set them back like that?

You just laid out both sides of the debate that were in the writers’ room, and we thought it made more sense for them — we thought if the goal is to bring them closer together, why not, in this instance, have them investigate this mystery together?

Mark Schafer/CBS

And also because they’re so good together.

They’re so great together. They have so much fun on set. They are silly, and they’re so good on screen.

Also, I think because you started the premiere with Colin popping up in the back of the seat, that moment alone shows this is what their partnership is now.

That is what their partnership is. I mean, the idea is that it doesn’t matter if they’re partners for a decade, on some level, Colin, just because of who he is, he’s a little sneakier than Bill, he is always going to be half a step ahead of Bill wherever they’re headed, which is impressive, but also annoying, the way siblings annoy each other, and we wanted to, yes, remind the audience of that dynamic at the top of the season.

You also introduced Debra from the DEA, and her and Nikki’s dynamic is great.

Nikki is a female intelligence officer in a fairly male, very competitive world. I don’t know how much the audience is aware — I mean, I don’t know how much I was aware until we started doing research and talking to our amazing consultants about the job that Nikki has, but the New York station of the CIA is a big deal, and for Nikki to have made it as high up to deputy station chief as she has means that she has to be tough, smart, better than the boys, sure. And so we like the idea of her having other kind of fearless, smart, capable, politically savvy female assets and female colleagues sprinkled around the city that she gets to call upon in various ways. I think that she and Debra are really similar, and I think they see each other as like, I see you. There’s a little bit of that to their relationship, and I think that they enjoy the fact that they’re both boss bitches.

CIA, Mondays, 9/8c, CBS