The very day we speak, she’s just wrapped Black Tides, a new survival thriller she’s leading alongside John Travolta—Danny Zuko himself. (In a recent interview with a local Mexican newspaper, Barrera admitted that it wasn’t unusual for the two to sing together on set: “Suddenly, while they’re changing camera setups, we break out into song. The truth is, the atmosphere is awesome.”)
But back to secret missions and handlers and classified documents: Barrera had always wanted to play a spy. You could say she manifested this job in the early 2000s, as a young teenager who watched Jennifer Garner in Alias on repeat.
The Copenhagen Test follows Alexander Hale (played by Simu Liu), a first-generation Chinese American who works as an intelligence analyst for a top-secret, basically nonexistent-on-paper organization called The Orphanage. Formerly in the special forces, Alexander now translates highly confidential conversations. After the agency experiences a few mysterious leaks, however, he discovers that his brain has been hacked by an unknown perpetrator who now has access to everything he sees and hears.
When Alexander meets Barrera’s Michelle, she’s the bartender on shift as he laments his ex. But she’s also much more than that: She’s associated with The Orphanage, can fight, and is soon in the middle of the agency’s mission to identify and stop the hacker.
Inevitably, the job comes with a lot of ass kicking—calling for a different kind of stunt work than Barrera had done before. She took to the training instantly. “I’m addicted to it,” she says. “I don’t want you to just teach me the choreography. I want to understand the root of each movement.” She’d willingly spend the days she wasn’t needed on set attending stunt practice. (During those five very cold months in Toronto, Barrera also went to Lagree classes, read Haley Cass’s Those Who Wait and When You Least Expect It, and saw Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver and last year’s Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land at the movies.) Barrera even went so far as to suggest that the stunt team develop Michelle’s fighting style so that she’d have an arsenal of go-to moves. (Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible provided some inspiration.)
So, what is Michelle’s backstory? Though the show peels back a layer or two in every episode, Barrera’s character remains a bit of a cipher. “I thought I was creating one story, and then the next episode would arrive and I’d be like, Oh, well that doesn’t make sense anymore,” she says. “I need to regroup and think of something else.” Barrera doesn’t like to cover her scripts with notes, but she does read them “a million times” so that every possible way to play a scene feels available to her in the moment.
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