Fans of the spy genre are being well looked after on the small screen at present, with Jack Ryan on Amazon, Killing Eve on the BBC, and Condor on the Audience Network in the US among many others. The Cold War spy genre is at the heart of another new series coming to Starzplay this week – Counterpart, starring JK Simmons. It’s a spy series with a genre twist: Howard Silk (Simmons) is a lowly cog in the bureaucratic machinery of a Berlin-based United Nations spy agency. When Howard discovers that his organization safeguards the secret of a crossing into a parallel dimension, he is thrust into a shadow world of intrigue, danger, and double cross… where the only man he can trust is his near-identical counterpart from this parallel world. The show was created by Justin Marks, who chatted with Paul Simpson from the Berlin set of season 2…

Congratulations on the Emmy for Outstanding Main Title Design.

Thank you, everyone is very excited. Everyone worked really hard on that title sequence; we’re so very proud of Karin [Fong] and the team.

Counterpart feels like John le Carré wrote Sliding Doors…

That’s a very accurate assessment. I grew up reading John le Carré and Graham Greene and always wanted to do a story in that world, but didn’t want it to be the traditional espionage story. I wanted to find a metaphysical twist – as if the Berlin Wall were an existential construct, and the Cold War that was being fought very surreptitiously was between two somewhat identical and equal dimensions.

That’s where it all started from – to tell a science fiction story, but to tell it using the tropes and the clichés of the espionage drama, so that we would have all the things that we’ve come to expect and come to love from a traditional John le Carré thriller just brought into the science fiction realm.

There’s been a renaissance on television in spies with Condor, Jack Ryan, Killing Eve – is there a reason for it being so forward in the zeitgeist at present, or is it purely parallel evolution between creative folk?

No, I think it has to do with the nature of the medium. With feature films – at least in the United States, and I know it first-hand from having written on such films – they’re driven more towards branded large scale blockbuster movies. When you want to tell an original story it becomes the kind of thing that TV is the better landscape for.

I think there are a lot of really great spy stories that need to be told on a really big canvas and a lot of people are moving to television for that. I firmly believe twenty years ago, The Americans would have been a movie; likewise, Three Days of the Condor would have been remade as a feature film. Now there’s more of a hunger for it in television and so I think a lot of things are starting to spread out that way.

The Americans sort of was a movie in Arlington Road…

Yes – Arlington Road’s a fantastic movie. We actually watch it quite a bit for the second season that’s in production right now because there are certain things that I want to really lean into.

Was there a specific image or a scene in your head that was the touchstone for the genesis of the show?

Yes, the whole show started from the idea of the interface room in the very first episode. Someone walked in in a very Fritz Lang-esque environment, stepping down a long corridor with a bunch of other people who are wearing identical suits they had to change into, and passing coded messages across to their counterparts the other side of the lines.

I had no context or understanding as to where that person came from, or what that place was, and gradually used it as an exercise as a writer: what would be really interesting there? I had this image, and it made me want to know who those people are. What should it be?

The next logical step was where Howard meets Howard Prime. Someone is brought into a room, the hood is pulled off of this other person, and I did a freeze frame in my head. George Harwood, who I was collaborating with as we were conjuring  up the idea, and I said, “Who would be the most interesting person to be underneath that hood…?” and came to this idea: what if he was looking at himself, and a version of himself who appears to be the same, and in a lot of ways shares the same childhood but lived a very different life for several decades? Who would that person become and what themes would that open up?

Those were really the central images that the whole show started to wrap around. On the surface it is a spy thriller, and has all the plot turns and twists that one would come to expect, but really at the end of the day it’s a show about identity and what makes us who we are. Two versions of the same self confronted with each other and forced to evaluate, to take stock of some of the choices that they made.

That doesn’t just apply to JK Simmons’ Howard, but every character in the show – in the second episode, we wanted to make a big statement and turn the story inside out. Tell the story of the villain and show how impacted Baldwin is by this. It doesn’t matter who the character is – every character on our show is confronted by this version of their life unlived at some point

And their reactions presumably are going to be built on who they were pre- and post-split…

Yes, and in some cases they are characters who didn’t exist pre-split so we really worked through the stories that they would have. I think you’ll find in the first season as the story gets on and deepens, there are a lot of twists where the show starts turning upside down on itself as you learn who some people really are.

Did you have the whole first season mapped out when you started production?

We were very fortunate in the writers’ room. In the first season we were waiting for a lot of scheduling conflicts to align so we had all 10 scripts for the first season written before we started – which was very nice creatively.

It created a lot of production hurdles because of course when you have 10 scripts written, there becomes this temptation to shoot like a giant feature film [shooting all the scenes set in one location together]. If you’re an actor and you’re playing two different versions of yourself and then over time you’re also playing two different versions of that self pretending to be the other self, and then that’s spread across ten episodes, you have a lot of different motivations to keep track of.

It was a blessing and a curse – it was a blessing in really knowing where the story was going and being very confident in that tone where normally the first season of a show has to find itself. We had that in the writers’ room – we could go down blind alleys and say, “This is no good,” and turn around long before we committed anything to film.

I’ve often noticed that it’s not till you get to about episode 7, particularly on a network show, that you know what the show really is, particularly in this genre. Having those 10 scripts presumably allowed you to layer in elements to the early scripts of foreshadowing that otherwise you might have kicked yourself for not being able to do…

Oh yeah, it’s not just that. We were able to layer in for the second season. The title sequence alone is foreshadowing a lot of reveals that don’t happen until the sixth episode of season 2, things that we were able to carry forward.

This is really important to me in the science fiction genre: to decide as writers for the show what questions you’re going to answer and when, and if you’re not going to answer certain questions early on, to have confidence in that and leave it at that. One of the things that was never that interesting to me until we got to know the characters was how did this all come to be? What is it? I would rather just live in the world and build the audience’s trust that we’re going to continue to invest them with as much information as they need to follow the story and yet not too much. It’s when stories begin to spoon feed information ahead of when it’s actually of interest that it takes me out as a viewer, so we really tried to protect that.

There’s the flip side – there are shows that it’s very clear when you’re watching that the writers don’t know the backstory and they’re doing a desperate duck paddle under the surface to try to work it out. It’s obvious when there is the solid state knowledge.

A lot of shows are built that way nowadays because now, at least in the American cable model, you’re not getting as much of a pilot set up. We knew we had two seasons before we shot a single frame of the first episode. We knew we could prepare for that and be patient with certain stories and really accelerate other stories that we knew we wanted to take to a logical conclusion in the middle of the run.

You’ve got great central performances – JK Simmons’ two Howards you can’t mistake which one it is… and I’m sure that that’s going to be put to the test down the line…

It is and it isn’t, though. That’s what’s amazing about JK’s performance in the show. I will say even when he is one posing as the other, it’s a completely different performance from when he’s playing the other. It’s an impression of an impression – when you used to see Johnny Carson doing Walter Matthau: that’s what JK is able to do. He’s able to be one character pretending to be another character and that’s not the same as being the other character. There are layers upon layers – it’s amazing to watch him do it.

How did you get him involved?

JK read the script for the first episode and signed up for it with myself and Morten Tyldum, who directed the first episode. Morgan and I sat down with him and walked him through. He confessed, “I don’t like science fiction but you tricked me into liking science fiction.”

I always thought that was the right thing because science fiction is not a genre, it’s where many genres appear: you can have a sci-fi story in space, a sci-fi story set in the future, a sci-fi story about artificial intelligence or a sci-fi story about life on another planet. All of those things have to conform to other things. When you set about trying to tell a story that is a good character drama that’s really about two versions of the same marriage, or one failed version of it, both overlapping with another, that’s a more interesting story to me. Then you layer everything else on top of that and it checks off the boxes. JK and I approach it from a place of, “This is about these two characters fundamentally – as well as other characters – and everything else should be subservient to that.”

How much input did he have during the writing process?

Let’s say before it was shot we definitely had a lot of sessions of reworking things and explaining why things were a certain way and how they pay off later. He was very involved in the trajectory of his characters.

If you knew you’d got someone of his abilities on the team, were you writing to what you knew he could do, or were you still writing the character not being concerned as to who was playing him?

No, we could just write to that. We have the father from Juno, we have the drunk teacher from Whiplash to write for – both of those are two different manifestations of the same self. It gives you a good amount of freedom to know he could do this, he can do that.

Technically, are the scenes with doubles shot in the traditional way of a main actor with a double responding to that?

Well, we made a refinement by getting on the shoulders of other innovations. We tried to step forward. There are obvious occasions where we have split screen, and some motion control in the first two episodes especially, although we tended to phase it out because it’s so time-consuming, but the thing that we really relied on for the performance was not simply casting a double as a human tennis ball for JK and an eyeline. Instead, we cast in John Funk another actor who had a likeness to JK Simmons, which was great so we could shoot over his shoulder, but who really performs on the other side, and who watched both sides of JK’s performance and then emulated it for him, so when they go at each other, they can really go at each other. They can really pick at each other’s lines and deliver the tension between one another.

That was really important because I think you can tell when you’re watching an actor acting off of nothing and when you’re watching them with another actor. So all the cases of counterpart work that we’ve done in this show, since the first episode, we’ve always followed that rule of finding another actor or actress who looks like the other actor and can perform. That’s really helpful. They’ll find moments within  the scene so it’s not just JK acting with a robot, he’s literally acting with someone, that’s interesting, let’s try that.

Where did you find Sara Serraiocco [who plays Baldwin]?

She came through casting. She was an Italian actress who hadn’t done a lot of English language work but we knew in Baldwin there is a character who is kind of a silent film star in her own right. We wanted to tell the story of someone who had a really unique look and a unique energy that was off centre, that was not just the traditional sexy assassin who comes through and does things. We wanted Baldwin to have a more complex inner life so we wanted someone who could embody that. The language could come afterwards.

Sara learned English over the course of making the first season of the show; she’s completely fluent now so we can do even more with her. It’s been amazing watching her.

What’s been the biggest challenge for you as a writer and producer on the show?

I think the biggest challenge for all the writers on this show, and we have in this in the writers room time and time again, is that we can’t write a simple scene that just has one layer.

The problem is there’s a bit of three-dimensional chess that’s happening. Every scene has to play in and of itself, then it has this other layer that plays over it against another story in another dimension where things are still related to each other. There’s a metaphor that we use a lot this season that you could apply to the first as well, of shadow boxing. They’re boxing against themselves but there’s this shadow of another self that they’re consciously competing with. Narratively we try to emulate that so that if one Howard is doing this, then the other Howard has to have this other version of that, and yet it still has to conform to our story and to the plot. It also has to still to conform to something that’s entertaining… so there’s all these cartwheels we have to do just to write a scene, just to get a plot turn.

That’s one of the more exhausting elements of the show but the good news on it is we’re able to rely on a genre I know and love, the spy genre. We can do that scene where we meet a source on the park bench, we can do that scene where there’s a double agent who’s been inside an organisation who’s now going to provide them with information. We can have a mole or a traditional mole hunt. As the first season goes deeper, it gets very very murky when that starts to come about. Those stakes allow us to say, “Great, now let’s do our version of the mole, our version of what a secret program from the other side would be, with counterparts.”

It’s funny you mention episode 7 in shows where they find themselves – even though we were confident of our tone and what we wanted to do, I would say episode 7 of the first season of our show is suddenly where everything just turns inside out. There’s  a huge twist that reveals where this world really lives on a much grander scale. That’s when things begin to get bigger and also more intimate at the same time as you start to learn what the villains are up to, what’s really going on. We’re able to constantly navigate between those two  genres.

And plenty of shades of grey.

That was important too to play to this idea. We set this as a rule – there is no such thing as happiness, or a character that’s lived a fulfilled life in the real world, or this show especially. There’s no black and white, there’s no good character, no evil character with a twirling moustache. Everyone here is equally damaged and equally flawed, just in different ways, and they manifest them in different ways.

Finding the areas where the Howards are different is interesting, but what’s more interesting is finding the areas where they’re actually very much alike, and they’re just different manifestations of the same impulse taken to two different extremes.

So many questions come to mind as you watch – such as when is it set? There are all these 1980s computers…

That has a very simple answer – rather than doing the scene where we explained, one of the things we wanted to do was rely on everyone’s collective intelligence, particularly watching a show like this. It sort of becomes clear but the idea is that inside the office of interchange, the technology is all grounded to a specific era when all this began.

The reason is very simple – as things began to develop in each world, they didn’t want to show the other world what they had so they agreed to a baseline, and the baseline was when it began… which of course offers clues as to when it started and when this office first began its procedures. Because they were very rooted in the Cold War, it transitioned from one cold war into another and they took all the recently unemployed spies and employed their tradecraft to this new world, which is why it has an antiquated feel because they’re trying to maintain this baseline.

Having said that, the other reason is stylistically it allows us to tell a story that doesn’t rely on lasers or special wiretaps that couldn’t possibly work. We have to rely on old school technology.

Has there been material from Berlin’s history that you’ve found while filming there that’s made you have to include it?

Absolutely. One of the biggest examples I can point to if you look at the design concepts for the place we call Customs, the immediate receiving area for people as they cross over from the different worlds: the wood panelling, the Polaroid photos, even down to the circulation, this is all very closely taken at the crossings between East Berlin and West Berlin. The Customs set was very closely modelled on a  real place, the Palace of Tears, the Friedrichstraße U-bahn station between East and West where people came through. It follows a logical system because a logical system actually existed in the real world. That did not come about till we landed on the ground in Berlin and started to scout locations.

I believe whether it’s writing, directing or producing, the best work responds to an environment, so we began to evolve the show around where we were. Berlin wasn’t just an allegory for a world where there was once a wall – instead it becomes this very rich world that we can take little details from and apply it back into the show.

Counterpart season 1 will be available on Starzplay from Friday September 28.

Thanks to Danielle Kemble at DDA for her help in arranging this interview.