Melissa Barrera and I go way back, but not in the traditional way. We’d never met before our Zoom interview, but we were both born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, and attended the same school. She was seven years ahead of me, but when I was in elementary school, I saw her in a couple of our school’s musical productions: as Rizzo in Grease and Amneris in Aida. She really was always meant to be an actor; it was clear even then.
“Do we know each other?” she says, in Spanish, after joining the call. “I recognize your name.” But we aren’t meeting to talk about those early years in northern Mexico, where she discovered her passion for musical theater. We’re here to talk about Barrera’s latest project, The Copenhagen Test, an espionage thriller coming to Peacock on December 27. A departure from last year’s horror-comedy Abigail, in which she starred with Dan Stevens and the late Angus Cloud, and the delightful Your Monster, with Tommy Dewey and Meghann Fahy, the series marks her first return to the small screen since she led Netflix’s survival drama Keep Breathing in 2022.
In August of last year, Barrera got the script for the first two episodes of an untitled Simu Liu–James Wan project (both are executive producers), which she thought was well written. “I was at a time in my life where I knew I wanted to get back to work on something challenging but also something that was going to be fun for me,” she tells me from an apartment in Barcelona. “This checked all the boxes.”
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.
She also creates a kind of digital scrapbook for her characters, compiling visual inspiration on Instagram, jotting down ideas in her Notes app, and making themed playlists. What’s in the playlist for Michelle? I ask. “The real Michelle?” Barrera says. “Indie rock with some electronic dance music. There was Depeche Mode on there.”
As an actor, Barrera looks for something to relate to in her characters. Vanessa from In the Heights? Wanting to get out of her neighborhood to chase big creative dreams (“I am that character,” she said in 2021). Sam Carpenter from Scream? Being the protective big sister (Barrera is the oldest of four women). Michelle from The Copenhagen Test? “Michelle is very guarded because she’s been betrayed a lot and she’s been used,” Barrera explains. “So she keeps her walls up, and in a very literal way, she protects herself. I can be that way—obviously not to that extreme—but when somebody hurts or betrays you, it builds an armor. I can be very detached when I find myself in that situation.”
Most of Barrera’s scenes have her opposite Liu, whom she met after arriving in Toronto. On set, their dynamic was playful, collaborative, and full of fun. “Simu always brings people with him to set, and he surrounds himself with really cool people,” she says, “So they all became my friends too.”
We also see Michelle with her handler Parker, played by Sinclair Daniel; though at first the women don’t seem to have much in common, eventually they establish a camaraderie. (In reality, Barrera and Daniel had such wonderful chemistry that the showrunners kept tweaking scenes to put them in the same room.)
Barrera hopes that 2026 brings with it similarly meaningful work. “Especially nowadays, it’s so important to be intentional in the stories that we’re putting out there,” she says. “I just want to be part of things that feel like they’re being made for a reason—and the reason is good.”
She doesn’t discount the value of representation in film and television, for one thing. “The three major characters in this are people of color,” she says of The Copenhagen Test. “It’s not something that you see very often in this kind of show.”
She has a few things in development that she’s excited about, including a sapphic period romance that she started writing in Toronto and is now trying to get produced. (Portrait of a Lady on Fire is one of her favorite films, and she’s always wanted to do a period drama.) Barrera’s also working on a sexy TV dramedy and a rom-com, and she’s attached to several other projects with really good scripts, one being In the Cradle of Granite, a Western thriller from Costa Rican filmmaker Ariel Escalante that she’s hoping to shoot next year. In the future, she’d love to work with The Gilded Age’s Morgan Spector, The Big Short’s Adam McKay, The Zone of Interest’s Jonathan Glazer, and Kaouther Ben Hania, who directed this year’s lauded (and urgent) The Voice of Hind Rajab.
But for now Barrera is headed back home to Austin, where she lives with her husband. She likes settling back into her routine: hitting the gym, taking tennis lessons, hanging with her neighbors (“who have become my family”). Mostly, she loves staying home and soaking in her hot tub in the evening. She’s ending the year busy—“The hustle never ends!”—but happy too. We love to see it.
In this story: Styling, Penny Lovell. Hair, Clayton Hawkins. Makeup, Lilly Keys.