Piper Perabo – Covert Affairs

By: Jamie Steinberg

It’s been another hot year on USA Network’s hit show “Covert Affairs.” With summer coming to an end, we all must prepare for what is bound to be an epic Season Five Summer Finale. We had a chance to speak with star Piper Perabo this week and she shared some juicy details about what to expect this coming Tuesday, August 26th at 10/9 Central on USA!

Auggie (Christopher Gorham) and Annie have been a dynamic duo from the start and we all know that they even dabbled in the romance department for a while. This season, Annie has had a different kind of relationship with him and has even kind of turned on him at one point. So, we wondered how Piper saw the current status of their relationship. “Well, I think in the previous season when Annie went dark, she was having to work all on her own and she also found out about this heart condition, which she was so worried would take her off the board for working for the CIA. So, it’s been a process of her coming back into the fold and learning to work as a team,” Perabo notes. Further expanding on the topic, Piper shared, “I think in a big-picture sense that’s kind of what’s going on with Annie and Auggie. But also it’s hard to go to work with your ex-boyfriend, even if what you are doing is a less stressful job than the CIA. But I think the kind of friction of what they have gone through as a couple and come out the other side can’t help, but be underneath all the conversations they have. I mean, especially at work, they can’t really speak about their personal relationship, but it’s always there.” Based on Piper’s admission, it further had us curious about whether she felt Auggie could even trust Annie at this point! So, we made sure that we asked Piper to clarify. “Chris and I have been doing these scenes where Annie and Auggie are kind of fighting and I hate it. I’m always telling him, ‘You could be nicer to Annie right now!’ And he’s always saying, ‘You’re not telling me the truth!’ I wish that Auggie would be more understanding, but that’s the Annie side of things and I know he has to represent the Auggie side of the things. But, in real life, we still have our chairs next to each other and drink our coffee together.”

Auggie isn’t the only significant work related relationship Annie has in her life. Fans enjoy seeing the female dynamic between Annie and Joan (Kari Matchett). So, will we get to see any development in their relationship in the season finale? Piper shares, “Yes, you will see some development. What the finale sets in motion is too big for Annie to handle on her own and she needs all the different pieces of her sort of spy network to be able to go forward. And so that means whatever problems she’s had with Joan in the past, she has to at least come face to face with so that they can work together to complete this thing that’s happening.” Sounds like there will be plenty of girl power on the way!

Okay, so now that we have Annie’s team in order, let’s talk about love. We all enjoy Annie’s life outside of the CIA, but she sure does seem to have a hard time finding love. Sure, she’s a career driven woman, but a girl needs a little romance now and then. Enter McQuaid, perhaps? Piper confesses, “I think when you’re a very career-oriented woman sometimes you don’t have as much time to go meet all kinds of guys. You’re a little bit limited to the guys that work in your office. I don’t know. I think a lot of girls can sort of relate to that problem. Annie’s really lucky that really good-looking guys work in her office. So, she doesn’t have to look too far.” Now, if only more of us had that same problem….For those that wonder what it is about McQuaid (Nic Bishop) that made her let him go last week and whether she was thinking with her head or heart, Piper assures us that it was not a storyline that was taken lightly. “When we rehearsed that scene, we talked for a long time about why does Annie let him go. If you look at it in seconds, the amount of time from when she pulls the gun on him until she decides…I mean, she doesn’t put the gun down, but she doesn’t shoot and she lets him leave,” Piper states. “And it was all these tiny increments of ‘if you really trusted him you’d put the gun down and help him with whatever he needed. So, how do you kind of work that in (that gray area) and how do you not cross the line with somebody so that you can never go back and they can never trust you? How can McQuaid ever come to ask her for help again? How you act in that scene and how you treat each other starts to set up their whole relationship for the last seven episodes. There was a lot of versions of that scene in the rehearsal room,” Perabo assures.

Annie does seem to have a lot in common with McQuaid and the two appear to have steamy chemistry. We wondered if their relationship evolved based on that chemistry between them and the way the actors have clicked. “The structure of how McQuaid is built is it’s the same structure they intended, but I think a little bit the style of McQuaid has evolved because of how Nic and I do the scenes,” shares Perabo. She expands, “Nic has this real kind of like bravado or something about the way he plays McQuaid. So, the writers (Matt and Chris especially) love that kind of man, that kind of quick witted, throw caution to the wind kind of guy. Once they saw how Nic embraced it in those opening Columbia episodes, they got really excited.”

Piper did make a good point about Annie’s heart condition earlier. In fact, what is her heart condition exactly? According to Perabo, it was touched on a bit in Season 3, but not fully. Pressing Piper to get more details on Annie’s wound got some interesting results! “It’s so funny. I’m glad you said this. I said this to the writers the other night because we were in Canada or abroad when we were filming this. So, when the episodes air in the United States, I’m rarely in the US. So, I can’t watch it along with everybody else. But what I do is follow the Twitter feed and I’ll follow #CovertAffairs and then the hashtag for that episode. And I said, ‘The viewers don’t understand that when Annie was shot in the heart in Season 3 when she was with Simon in her kitchen and she was going to run away and she got shot, Simon gets fatally shot and Annie’s shot in the heart! The scar tissue from that gunshot wound is what’s causing this heart condition she has now.’ And when I said that I called the writer’s room and I’m like, ‘They don’t know!’ I’m like, ‘We must have said it in an important scene where something else was going on or Chris took his shirt off or something because they didn’t hear us.” Not that female fans mind…But Piper did want faithful fans to know that, “A lot of viewers did not understand that it’s all connected all the way back to the Simon shooting and the scar tissue from that is what’s messing with her heart.” The writers wrote it and there is a larger metaphor at play there.” Hmm. I’m not the only one who is excited to see what this means for the finale and Season 6!

With all that of in mind, what is in store for the final mission of the season? Rest assured, it will be as big – if not bigger – than you imagine it to be! “The finale is so big we had to shut down a part of Toronto for it. We had to shoot on the weekends. It was so huge,” Perabo shares gleefully. In fact, it has quite a memorable moment with McQuaid. Confesses Perabo, “One of the things that I liked about McQuaid and the mission in the end is it comes all the way back around. So, I think it’s in episode nine when you see the scene in the DPD conference room and it’s Joan, Arthur, Calder – like everybody is at the table.” For those wondering what this means, you might want to hold on to your seats. Perabo spills, “Because the mission and what McQuaid’s being folded into, it’s so big it’s not just Annie that can handle it. So, that’s one of the things that got me really excited about the mission for ten is that you need everybody. Even when we shot it, we were like ‘Yes, the band is back together!’ It was fun for everybody to do these giant scenes together.”

Sounds like Season Five Finale this Tuesday is a not to miss event! And for those that do tune in, Piper has a word of advice, “The summer finale hashtag is #WhosTheEnemy, in case you are going to be following the conversation. I’ll be following that hashtag.” Be sure to watch and follow along online with the electric espionage.