Melissa Barrera and I go way back, but not in the traditional way. We’d never met before our Zoom interview, but we were both born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, and attended the same school. She was seven years ahead of me, but when I was in elementary school, I saw her in a couple of our school’s musical productions: as Rizzo in Grease and Amneris in Aida. She really was always meant to be an actor; it was clear even then.
“Do we know each other?” she says, in Spanish, after joining the call. “I recognize your name.” But we aren’t meeting to talk about those early years in northern Mexico, where she discovered her passion for musical theater. We’re here to talk about Barrera’s latest project, The Copenhagen Test, an espionage thriller coming to Peacock on December 27. A departure from last year’s horror-comedy Abigail, in which she starred with Dan Stevens and the late Angus Cloud, and the delightful Your Monster, with Tommy Dewey and Meghann Fahy, the series marks her first return to the small screen since she led Netflix’s survival drama Keep Breathing in 2022.
In August of last year, Barrera got the script for the first two episodes of an untitled Simu Liu–James Wan project (both are executive producers), which she thought was well written. “I was at a time in my life where I knew I wanted to get back to work on something challenging but also something that was going to be fun for me,” she tells me from an apartment in Barcelona. “This checked all the boxes.”
The very day we speak, she’s just wrapped Black Tides, a new survival thriller she’s leading alongside John Travolta—Danny Zuko himself. (In a recent interview with a local Mexican newspaper, Barrera admitted that it wasn’t unusual for the two to sing together on set: “Suddenly, while they’re changing camera setups, we break out into song. The truth is, the atmosphere is awesome.”)
But back to secret missions and handlers and classified documents: Barrera had always wanted to play a spy. You could say she manifested this job in the early 2000s, as a young teenager who watched Jennifer Garner in Alias on repeat.
The Copenhagen Test follows Alexander Hale (played by Simu Liu), a first-generation Chinese American who works as an intelligence analyst for a top-secret, basically nonexistent-on-paper organization called The Orphanage. Formerly in the special forces, Alexander now translates highly confidential conversations. After the agency experiences a few mysterious leaks, however, he discovers that his brain has been hacked by an unknown perpetrator who now has access to everything he sees and hears.