If you're a fan of character-driven dramas, spy thrillers, or sci-fi adventures, look no further than Starz's new show Counterpart, which is all three rolled into one. The series premieres on Jan. 21 — allow me to convince you to tune in for it.
J.K. Simmons plays Howard Silk, a cog in the United Nations building in Berlin, Germany. He works for the Office of Interchange, which involves going into a little booth and exchanging cryptic phrases with someone on the other side of a plate of glass. In 30 years of working there, Howard has never really questioned his position or work, but that all changes when an assassin starts killing people in his world — and it turns out she's a "counterpart" from a second version of our world.
Three decades ago, the world split off into a second world (called "Prime") that runs alongside our world, with duplicates of every person. But the two worlds began to diverge at some point and now they look very different from one another, which means that people's counterparts might also be very different.
Howard 1.0 meets his counterpart, Howard Prime, who is an operative from the other world — and they could not be more different from each other. But they must work together, along with a select few trustworthy UN employees, to figure out why someone from Prime is killing people in the original world.
And Howard isn't the only person whose counterpart appears on the show. While other characters may have to wait a while (even until season two or beyond) to meet their counterparts, the executive producers told me at the 2018 TCA Winter press tour that every actor on the show does know what his or her counterpart is like.
"Without getting into spoilers for the latter part of the season, or even season two, we as writers and producers and actors on the show, everyone knows who their 'other' is," creator Justin Marks told me. "Everyone knows when that person will appear and who that person will be when they do appear, so they are baking into their performance a strong sense of who they will be on the other side. So when that person does appear, it gives us a lot of headstart, which is really fun."
In asking some of these actors what they can tease about their counterparts, I got some very cryptic answers.
Harry Lloyd, formerly Viserys Targaryen on Game of Thrones [2], told us that his character, Quayle, and his counterpart are "pretty different" from having been put into "very different situations" in their respective worlds. And Nazanin Boniadi said that her two Clares are "vastly different."
But Sara Serraiocco, who plays Baldwin the assassin in the Prime world and Nadia the concert violinist in the original world, says that even though her two characters seem very different on the surface, they're actually quite similar. They're both loners, they have a shared underlying pain from their childhood, and they're both very driven to succeed, even if it may be in two radically different occupations.
What it boils down to is a question of identity, which show creator Marks said is really the heart of this show.
"This is a show about identity, whether that means gender identity, sexual identity, ethnic identity, or country of origin in some way, and we explore all of these ideas on the show and as the world change around us, these ideas just become more and more important," said Marks, with Executive Producer Jordan Horowitz adding that the science fiction elements of the show are definitely taking a back seat to the characters, at least for now.
"Justin describes [the show] as a Cold War spy thriller with sci-fi sprinkled over the top, so the bigger sci-fi questions about the how and the why of stuff were very intentionally pushed to the back," said Horowitz. "It's world-building and a very large palette on which to answer questions about identity, and nature versus nurture, and how do people develop, and what are the choices people make, and how do those change you as a person?"
"I only have one criterion when it comes to stories that I like, it's 'Do I care?'" added Marks. "Do I care about these people? Do I care about this story? I wanted Howard and his love for his wife to be the central, emotional, driving force of it. And then you introduce another version [of Howard] who maybe loves that woman, too, and you start to introduce details about the wife to complicate who she is and it becomes more interesting. And then everything about the mythology and the creation of the crossing and the worlds and how the Office of Interchange functions — that just starts to dance around the characters and give us new twists and turns as it moves on."