FX’s The Veil takes the audience into the world of international espionage on a personal and global scale. The series follows CIA agent Imogen Salter (Elisabeth Moss), who is tasked with taking Adilah El Idrissi (Yumna Marwan) on a trip from Istanbul to Paris and London. All the while, however, Salter is attempting to get El Idrissi to reveal a secret that could save thousands of lives. The series also follows the CIA’s Max Peterson (Josh Charles) and the French DGSE’s Malik Amar (Dali Benssalah), both of whom must put aside their prospective agency’s differences in order to help Imogen complete her mission.
Peterson works for the CIA in counter-terrorism and finds himself swept up into this mission. “He’s kind of written as a bit of an instigator, as a disrupter. So he’s a bit of a s*** stirrer,” Charles told GameSpot. “He brings in some darkish humor, and what I think is interesting is that there’s a lot of ‘loosey goosey’ on top, and a lot of language and making fun of the fringe. Underneath all of it, there’s a lot of order and a lot of discipline. He’s one of these guys that grew up in this world with a military background, and he’s been doing this a long time, so it feels like he knows the rules so well that he could just kind of push them all the way to the edge.”
The counterpart Peterson is forced to work with is Amar, and the two of them have very different personalities. “[Amar] is strictly professional,” Benssalah explained. “His job is his life. He’s at the center of a major international investigation, but he’s not on the ground. He is stuck in the office. So he feels powerless because [he] can’t be out there with Imogen. He knows he and Imogen have a complex, romantic, and professional relationship. When we meet the character, we can see that he is ready to explode. This is a tricky, dangerous mission. And also the fact that he’s forced to to work with the CIA, and he doesn’t really like their representative, Max Peterson. Nothing goes the way he wanted. He is already nervous.”
While The Veil is a serious look at the world of espionage and spying, there is a bit of real-life levity within the series. You can see this in the clip above, which features Peterson and Amar’s first meeting. However, this encounter promptly turns into a fight over a cell phone in the middle of an airport. “It’s a crazy thing happening just in front of his eyes,” said Benssalah. “They are just not professional at all, so it’s a big surprise to Amar.”
The same can’t be said for Peterson, Charles explained. “[Creator] Steven Knight is putting in the idea that these guys are all like big kids, and it resorts to schoolyard fighting very quickly. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it was fun to play. And I think that dynamic allowed some freedom to be able to go a little silly with it at times because I think it’s grounded in as much of reality as you can.”
The FX series The Veil airs Tuesdays on Hulu. Episode 1 and 2 both launch on the streaming service on April 30.
