Piping Hot Piper Perabo
By Tom Gottlieb
Source: Capitol File Magazine

Falling in love hasn’t always been easy for Piper Perabo. She’s explaining this to me, the difficulty of developing a romantic rapport with actors who like to keep their on-screen love interests at a safe distance, when something occurs to me: Perabo is almost impossibly disarming. She’s attractive in that approachable, down-to-earth sort of way that few celebrities are, but with the enviable bone structure and even more enviable body (more on that in a bit) we’ve come to expect of them. She’s exceedingly polite: She asks for me by my full name when she calls, even though she’s ringing my cell phone; she compliments me profusely at the end of the interview—she even talks about how she couldn’t introduce herself to Tilda Swinton during this year’s Golden Globe Awards because she thought it too rude (she had someone else introduce her). And she’s effusive without being annoyingly peppy; her energy, even over the phone, is infectious. What I’m trying to say is, how could you not love Piper Perabo?

Lucky for the 34-year-old actress, her latest role, as CIA superspy Annie Walker on the USA Network’s Covert Affairs, has succeeded in turning plenty of heads. It was a ratings behemoth last summer, coming in at the number one spot for a cable series. It earned Perabo a coveted Golden Globe nomination. And, on the show at least, she’s fending off a minor horde of male suitors. (Perabo is notoriously tight-lipped about her private life; she politely deflected a few of my more personal questions.)

“One of the things I really like about Annie is how brave she is,” Perabo explains about her star turn. “She leaps before she looks.” You could certainly make the argument that this extends to Annie’s love life. But when your current office love interests are portrayed by Christopher Gorham—as the blind and shaggily handsome Auggie, willing to indulge her enthusiasm for danger—and Sendhil Ramamurthy as Jai (aka “the George Clooney of wherever he’s from,” as Annie’s sister hungrily observed in the show’s premiere season), it turns out you don’t need to work quite so hard at it.

“Chris Gorham is one of those guys who’s such a good guy that if you play his friend, after three scenes, it’s like, ‘Hey, you wanna go grab a beer and some pizza after this?’” says Perabo. “You can’t help it.” And Ramamurthy? “Some people look good on television, then you see them in real life and you’re like, ‘Oh, I get it—he’s only, like, four feet tall, or his head is way too big for his body.’ When Sendhil walks into a room, people just stare because he’s so handsome. I felt that way from the minute he walked into his audition. I was like, ‘Holy cow!’”

Sexy Spies
Let’s face it: A girl could certainly do a lot worse. And herein lies part of the appeal of the DC-based spy serial, the latest in a line of sleeper hits from USA. Instead of ducking the personal lives of spies, Covert Affairs embraces them. It’s a formula the network has channeled to great success with several other shows—most notably, the kindred Burn Notice. You can’t argue with the results: Perabo & Co. are back for a second season. And then there’s that aforementioned flirtation with awards season.

Perabo told the Associated Press the day of the Golden Globe announcements that she wasn’t even aware it was happening. “I was totally shocked,” she says. “I mean, I was obviously so happy, but it totally came out of the blue for me. But then it was really fun! As awards shows go, it’s the really fun one. So if you’re going to go to one, to start with the one where everybody is having a martini is great.”

Love triangles? Mayhem? Martinis? Bond would no doubt be proud. This is Perabo’s first foray into such a physically demanding role, something she’s proud to say she’s wholeheartedly embraced—even if being part of a Doug Liman (of Bourne trilogy fame) production, which are renowned for his frenzied depictions of hand-to-hand combat, can occasionally border on overload. “He gets really enthusiastic,” Perabo says. “On certain things, he’s like, ‘Well, what if the building fell over while you were in the middle of the fight?’ And I’m like, ‘Whoa, Doug! I just learned the fight! Let me do one thing at a time.’ He’s got this energy you can’t really hold back.”

But working with the acclaimed producer is not without its perks. Having a meeting arranged with Valerie Plame Wilson to discuss your character, for instance; Liman produced Fair Game, the 2010 film about the Plame affair, and even had her consult on the Covert Affairs pilot. Or springboarding this into meeting with CIA agents of your same age, to whom Perabo posed queries such as, “If you’re a secret agent, who’s your boyfriend?” and “What do you like to do when you go on vacation?” You know, normal people stuff.

Ready for Anything
And then, of course, there’s learning how to visit a world of hurt upon another human being. Aside from the usual rigors of serial television—12- to 18-hour days, guerrilla shoots in far-flung locales—Perabo’s schedule includes a backbreaking amount of physical activity. She trains in krav maga and wing chun for her fight scenes, and mixes in workouts like TRX, boxing, even ballet. “The show moves so fast and I’ve never read more than a few episodes ahead, so I just have to be ready,” she says. However, she’s quick to point out that this is all television fighting. So while Liman’s preference for shooting action sequences on handheld cameras means the fighters are working in very close quarters, it’s all quite harmless aside from the usual bumps and bruises. So can Perabo actually take you in a fight? Truth be told, she’s not entirely sure.

“One of my fight teachers, when he shows me a really awesome move to break somebody’s arm or finger, he’s always like, ‘Don’t do this if you go out one night,’” she says. “But I don’t know if that’s because I’m not supposed to break people’s arms or because they’re not actually going to break.”

To top it off, Perabo more often than not does her action sequences decked out in cocktail dresses and Louboutins. It adds a heretofore unexplored layer of fashion savvy to ass-kicking that the actress pulls off with aplomb. Still, it’s not without its own unique perils.

“You know, the dresses are fine,” explains Perabo. “It’s the shoes that are a little difficult to do all the action in. Early on, I realized that you can’t really run down an assassin in a six-inch stiletto. No matter how much fantasy is in this show, you just can’t buy it.”

Fantasy or not, Perabo’s head-first bravura in the role of Annie makes DC feel like a dynamic, proactive city the way few things have lately; the body politic is downright glacial compared to the weekly summer offerings of Doug Liman & Co. Eye candy, it may be. But escapism from the uninspiring gridlock of real-life Washington is, for us anyway, a welcome change of pace.

All of these things, of course, mean that Perabo has very little in the way of downtime. When she’s in production on Covert Affairs, it’s all 15-hour days, jetting back and forth from Toronto (the show’s primary shooting location) to exotic locales like Guam and Argentina, among others, and constant rehearsals of those intricate fight sequences. The off-season is for tackling big-screen fare, which recently included a shoot in New Orleans for the sci-fi thriller Looper, also starring Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt, due out next year. “It’s a tricky life,” she says, perhaps only half-jokingly.

And it’s a wonder Piper Perabo even has time for love at all.