"Covert Affairs" Actor Reveals All
VELSHI: Welcome back to STARTING POINT. TV audiences love a good spy story. And USA's hit show -- USA TV's hit show "Covert Affairs" delivers in spades.</s>SAMBOLIN: It's in its third season and stars Christopher Gorham as blind tech ops expert Auggie Anderson.</s>CHRISTOPHER GORHAM, ACTOR, "COVERT AFFAIRS": Now listen to me, if you don't get eyes on him in the first 15 minutes you pull the plug.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're good to go.</s>GORHAM: Barbara is going to relay the audio feedback to the</s>DPD. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hello.</s>GORHAM: Don't ever do that again.</s>SAMBOLIN: And Christopher Gorham is here. Thank you so much for being with us.</s>GORHAM: It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.</s>SAMBOLIN: So a lot of realism here. And I know that Valerie Plame actually consults on this.</s>GORHAM: Yes.</s>SAMBOLIN: So how is that?</s>GORHAM: It's fantastic. We-- we're able to sit down with her for hours when we were starting to rehearse the pilot and had a lot of conversations. You know Annie Walker is the main character of the show played by Piper Perabo. And that role is really based on the inspiration from Valerie Plame because Doug Liman is our producer is from the "Bourne" movies. And he was doing a movie about Valerie and her husband. And so he had access into Langley. Piper was able to go into Langley and meet with real CIA agents. Our writers go there every year. It's like a field trip to kind of brush up and get a tour around the building and talk to the officers. So you know this show is fictional, but we try to at least base some of the reality of the interoffice dynamics on the stories that they hear from the real CIA officers.</s>VELSHI: Do you think it's as much fun to be a real CIA officer?</s>GORHAM: Oh, God, no. No, no, no. It's much more fun to be on the show.</s>VELSHI: There's a lot more paperwork involved.</s>GORHAM: Yes our offices are much nicer than the real</s>CIA. BROWNSTEIN: Probably not -- probably not as dangerous either, right?</s>GORHAM: Yes, no definitely safer to be on the show as well, yes.</s>CAIN: So you play a blind character, right?</s>GORHAM: Yes.</s>CAIN: And I read something that you talked about the difference between how sighted people look each other in the face versus how you might look someone who is blind. Literally, how you stare in their eyes. Tell me -- tell me about that.</s>GORHAM: Yes well it's a for guy like Auggie because he -- he was a Special Forces guy, right? He had his sight up until he was injured when he was serving in Iraq. For guys like him, they're actually very good at making eye contact even after they've lost their sight. There's a muscle memory there where you just -- they're really good at it. We have to make him worse at it on the show so that it's not confusing for the audience. Where it became really interesting for me is -- are you all right? Put the coffee down, man. In the first season, we had an episode where Auggie was reunited with a girlfriend that he had before he lost his sight. I found it unexpectedly really frustrating in the scenes to not be able to make eye contact.</s>VELSHI: Right.</s>GORHAM: To have someone who your whole relationship is based on being able to see each other, having that unspoken communication, and suddenly when that's gone it can be really, really frustrating.</s>SAMBOLIN: I think we're seeing you there directing. Is that right?</s>GORHAN: There you go. Yes, yes, yes. I'm in the middle of directing an episode right now. We're four days into a seven-day episode. We usually take eight days to shoot an episode but since this is my first episode they decided to give me one less day to shoot it.</s>SOCARIDES: Does the government ever tell you that you can't use something because it's secret? Did they ever say to you can't portray that because it's secret?</s>GORHAM: Not as far as I know. I mean, you know, our storylines are -- are pretty fictional. The stuff -- the kind of danger that we deal with on the show is very real. And some of the topics that we deal with on the show are very real. But how we do it is always fictional so we don't run into any problems.</s>SAMBOLIN: Christopher Gorham, you say this is a good week to watch.</s>GORHAM: This is a great episode this week.</s>VELSHI: Would you say that if it wasn't?</s>GORHAM: Exactly. Right? You know, what I would say, this is a solid episode.</s>SAMBOLIN: All right. Thanks for being with us this morning. Appreciate it. The "End Point" is next.