Netflix's In From the Cold is a unique addition to the spy thriller genre. The Netflix television series fuses a great deal of character depth and exploration within a fun espionage thriller. At the start of In From the Cold, Jenny (Margarita Levieva) is an average middle-aged woman who's traveling with her daughter, Becca (Lydia Flemming). However, her secret past as a Russian spy operating during the Soviet Union's reign finally catches up to her. Despite the dangerous missions she finds herself on, the real meat of the series comes from Jenny's attempts to rediscover her spy roots and juggle her new responsibilities with maintaining her cover. Yet this gets even more complicated as Becca grows further away from her mother.
Ahead of In From the Cold's premiere, Executive Producer Adam Glass and series star Margarita Levieva revealed how the show reflected their personal lives in unexpected ways. The pair also discussed the joys of adding character drama into the spy genre.
CBR: Adam, you've worked in so many different genres at this point in your career, which benefits In From the Cold. At times it's a spy thriller, at times it's a character drama, it even becomes a comedy at points. How did your experience affect In From the Cold?
Adam Glass: You're 100% right. It definitely is very much about everything I've done. There are the procedural elements in it that come from my Cold Case and Criminal Minds years, then there's obviously the genre stuff that's my experience with Supernatural and comic book background. And then there's the hard drama side of me, which I did on The Chi. So I feel like you're right, it's a combination of all the things that I've done that came into the show.
I'd say maybe my biggest influence is Supernatural, just because I was able to see in that show how you could do something that really would seem almost otherworldly, but really take it and ground it in emotion. Supernatural was about the boys and their relationship. [In From the Cold] is really about a mom and her daughter at its core, and about a woman who is battling her past coming back to haunt her -- how she moves forward in her present and save her daughter from it. So to me, yes... All those things help make this possible.
Margarita, you're never quite sure how much Jenny is really revealing in any given moment. But that's juxtaposed by these smaller moments where she's alone and really seems to cut loose. It's a very interesting balance, I find, between what she reveals about herself to herself and what she reveals to everybody else. What was it like finding that balance for the character?
Margarita Levieva: Yeah, that was one of the aspects of the character that I really, really appreciated. I'm very grateful to Adam for writing it because the show is so grounded and is so human. I find that even in everyday situations, do we ever know who we really are? I feel like for so many people, that's a lifetime struggle. It's the lifetime adventure of really discovering who am I? Am I really in this moment? Where am I being honest? Where am I dishonest with myself, with other people? It's always fascinating to me as an observer, as an actor... I love to observe people.
Just seeing my friends with their kids, they have one voice and they have one attitude. When I see them with their co-workers, it's a whole other thing. When I see them with their friends, when I see them with their spouse, it's completely another thing. But it's all parts of them, all real parts of them. So to be able to explore that with this character for me was really, really thrilling, and just a wonderful opportunity to go deep and have so much freedom to know that I can do no wrong as long as I'm making it as honest for myself as possible. For Jenny, all of it is real and honest.
In most films, shows, and productions, you only get a snapshot of a character's life. But you, Margarita, you got the unique advantage of seeing Anya before she became Jenny -- along with Stasya Miloslavskaya's performance of Anya. You get a really fleshed-out view of who Jenny used to be, in contrast to who she is now. How did getting to see that aspect of the character inform your performance?
Levieva: It informed it a lot. Interestingly enough, I have a similar background to Anya because I grew up in Russia. I was trained as a rhythm gymnast myself. So much of my journey as an actor and as a human being has been undoing so much of that training, which was very rigorous, which was very strict.
To be able to do that in a series and to allow the audience to really see... This is the past, this is what happened, this is who was created out of that, and this is the woman that's trying to make a life for herself now that has these binds. It was such a great opportunity because I feel like I continue to do that in my life. To see that on a page and to be able to bring it to life and hope that somebody else might watch the show and go, "Oh wow, that's me. I get that." I know what that's like. I know what it's like to be raised a certain way, to be pounded into a certain human, and then have to undo all of that and discover who I really am and what really matters most.
Adam, why do you think this period of history -- those last breaths of the Soviet Union -- were such a fertile place as a creator to explore? What attracts you to this kind of story and setting as a creative?
Glass: It's funny. I was just in London and I did this thing called London Content. There were a lot of great people on the panel, but one of the writers said something which is so obvious, but until he said it, it didn't really click into my mind. He was a French writer and he said, "We're telling the same story over and over again as writers. So we're trying to work something out." So apparently, for me, I'm trying to work out my past and my present and my relationships and I'm doing it through this story.
I've always loved the spy genre, but as we know, the spy genre can be very surface-level. It could be very much just kick-ass action. I think what Daniel Craig brought to James Bond was this sort of deeper, more interesting character study. So having a show where we have eight episodes, eight hours, we could even explore that further. The idea of taking this amazing story that I was watching my wife go through -- and I've watched many women go through it -- which is there's this expiration date we say in our society that we think women go through, which is total bullshit. Life doesn't stop at 40.
This idea that this woman is now put in a position -- her daughter's about to leave the nest, but her past comes back to haunt her. Who she is and what's her identity, all that stuff just fascinated me. I wanted to write about it. Already loving the spy drama, it just seemed like the perfect marriage too.
Delve into the spycraft world of In From The Cold debuts, debuting on Netflix Jan. 28.