After becoming best known for the likes of Lucifer and Miranda, Tom Ellis has taken on a very different role in new procedural CIA.
In the FBI spin-off, Ellis plays Colin Glass, a rule-breaking CIA agent tasked with teaming up with rather more buttoned up FBI agent, William ‘Bill’ Randall (Nick Gehlfuss).
Ellis didn’t hesitate to do a "deep dive" into research for the role, speaking to real-life CIA agents – and what he found was eye-opening.
"There were lots of things that resonated with me," Ellis explained to Radio Times.
"We spoke to these advisors who were ex-CIA operatives that came into the writers room when we were first doing the show, and several things struck me. One is that I can't believe some of the operations that actually happened and the lives that these people have to live."
Ellis added: "One of the big things was how incredibly lonely an existence it is. You can't talk to anyone about it. Some people don't have partners who don't even know that they're doing what they do, and so a lot of them don't even have partners because it's just not even worth it.
"You have to be a sort of controlled sociopath to work in this kind of environment, basically. It’s a dark, murky, voyeuristic world, and it was just really interesting territory to explore."
Over the course of the show, which is already confirmed for season 2, Glass and Randall investigate domestic terrorist threats – with some eerie parallels to real life.
"We had a whole story in the first episode about Venezuela, about the use of a directed energy weapon, which lo and behold then happened months later," Ellis pointed out.
"We had a storyline about the Straits of Hormuz, which seems to be a popular thing in the news at the moment now. But that again was after the fact. We were never intending to predict events in the news, but it just shows how sort of close to the wind we sail when we're doing this kind of a show."
Meanwhile, the series also comes from Dick Wolf, a titan of US TV, who made one crucial change.
"I was all in, ready to play an American character," Ellis explained – but things changed when he met Wolf for the first time.
"After about a minute, he was like, 'Tom, I I've been talking to you for like five minutes, and we gotta make your character British. It's so damn charming.'"
He added: "It kind of is the perfect cover - they actually do have some British operatives in the CIA – but they wanted me to just be to bring that to the show because they thought it would just be a kind of new, interesting dynamic."
CIA is available to watch on Sky Witness and NOW.
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