'Undercovers' actor Carter McIntyre

If you're only going to watch one spy show this season (and goodness knows you've got a wide array of choices), let it be Undercovers. The J.J. Abrams show has been attracting attention for almost a year now due to the fact that its two black leads increase the diversity of NBC programming by about 500%, but I would be remiss to imply that this is the show's only point of interest. No, Abrams' return to lighter fare is a sexy, witty romp through the world of American intelligence-gathering, and I had the opportunity recently to speak with supporting actor Carter McIntyre, who plays the roguishly charming Leo Nash on the show. Enjoy!

How are you Carter?
Hi, I’m good. How are you?

I’m good. I’d love to hear how you got involved with Undercovers.
For me it was pretty much standard audition procedure. The difference was that it happened a lot quicker than usual because they had cast all the other regulars and I came in kind of late. I had just gotten back from a trip with some friends to South America and had an audition the same day, and within a week I’d gotten the part, so I didn’t have to go through all the usual hoops you have to go through to finalize it because everything was so down to the wire. I just had a couple auditions before getting the part; it all happened crazily fast for me—thankfully! It was pretty painless.

Well, that’s good. Watching the pilot I got the impression that your character’s storyline had been wrapped up, so it’s nice we’re already seeing him again.
Well, the cool thing about my character is that he’s not specifically tied to Samantha and Steven’s lives because he has his own life as a superspy going on at the same time. He’s involved in all these other things that you don’t see apart from the couple, so that brings a bit of mystery into the story. He knows things that they don’t know, and more importantly he knows things about each of them that the other doesn’t know. He knows why each of them originally left the CIA, aside from pursuing their relationship, and they don’t know that about each other. Leo brings an element of mystery to the story, and it’s fun having that extra knowledge about the storyline.

What do you like about playing him?
It’s just something new every week. I think the most fun for me is that you have this freedom to explore; Leo has the courage to do things you might not have the courage to do in real life. He says what he thinks, even if it’s crazy and off the wall; he kind of takes action first and thinks later, and he has a blast while doing it. It’s fun to be able to play a guy who enjoys his life so much, and you can kind of stir things up in other people without thinking twice about it. You can just get in the way and turn things around, and it’s a lot of fun to be able to push people’s buttons and get people going.

Spy shows are really having a moment right now, what with Undercovers, Nikita, and the shows on USA.
Yeah, it’s funny how it all seems to happen at the same time. You talk to the creators of these shows and they don’t plan it; they don’t get together and talk about how they’re all planning on creating spy shows, it’s just that these ideas usually tend to come out together. But the cool thing about our show is that we’re not really the run-of-the-mill spy show. The tone is quite different: we incorporate a lot of humor into each episode, so—while the stakes are high and there’s a lot of action and thrills and you don’t know what’s going to happen next with the drama of the story—there’s also an ongoing sense of fun and humor with each of these characters. Particularly with the Leo character and with the funniest man in America, Bill Schwartz, who plays Hoyt. I think, in a way, this separates our shows from the others in tone.

Well, I’m sure it’s a nice lighthearted break for J.J. Abrams.
Yeah, we were talking with him when we were doing the pilot and he was definitely excited about exploring this kind of material, the idea of lighter television fare, and he’s a hilarious guy. People don’t really know how funny he is. It was really cool to see guy you think of as this thrill-action-type hitmaker working on something this light and coming up with such great dialogue for a genre he’s not as known for, and he was really excited about it so we got really excited about it. Going forward we were just having a blast and discovering new things every day. We were jumping off buildings, crashing cars, shooting guns… it was a blast.

As actors have you had much interaction with him since the pilot?
We have, yeah. He actually co-wrote the first three episodes, and he is involved in watching the dailies of every episodes as well as with all the scripts; we actually had a meeting with him a little while back to check in before we got rolling again with everything. He was definitely involved with the show as it went forward, and he really made us feel great. It’s great when you have someone of that stature getting involved, and in addition to him we also have Josh Riems, who is the executive in charge; he’s the showrunner, the head writer, as well as the co-creator. He’s there every day as well and is all over it, and he’s an extremely bright guy—the guy you’d want running your show—so we’re really excited to have those two guys in charge.

Care to give a little insight as to upcoming storylines this season?
Yeah, we’re starting to touch on some of those; I’m trying to think of what I’m allowed to mention. Let’s see. There’s an ongoing storyline regarding why Steven left the CIA. We kind of allude to the fact that there are other reasons they left besides wanting to spend more time together as a couple; they originally left to get married and have their life together outside the CIA, but now they’re back in we’re finding out that they both had other reasons for leaving that each one doesn’t know about the other. Some of these storylines involve things they don’t know about each other—

But that Leo does know, I take it?
Leo does know, that’s the interesting thing. Leo does know the real reason why they left, and as we go forward we’re going to wonder if Leo knows there are other reasons Shaw brought them back as a couple into the CIA. We’re kind of exploring that as well. We’re just touching on it, so you kind of get a taste of it, and you’re really going to have to watch to see. I don’t want to say that much, but we wanted to show that there may be more than meets the eye. [laughs] It’s really fun to be involved with one of these J.J. Abrams mysteries but still get to do light stuff. Doing this show is really the best of both worlds.

Undercovers airs Wednesdays at 8pm on NBC.