Tom Ellis on Finding the Unexpected Friendship at the Heart of CIA

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For Tom Ellis, one of the most compelling things about stepping into the world of CIA was exploring a character whose entire profession requires him to obscure the truth. This along with his admiration for Dick Wolf as one of televisions most prominent creators led to his enthusiasm in joining the show.

As Colin, Ellis plays a veteran CIA operative who has spent decades learning how to read people, manipulate situations and become whatever a particular operation requires of him. That skill makes him exceptionally good at his job, but it has also left him increasingly disconnected from his own emotions and sometimes even from the truth of his own history.

“It is interesting playing someone who basically just lies constantly,” Ellis says. “We all sit here saying lying is bad, but it’s his job to do that, and he has to do it for the greater good, essentially.”

Before filming began, Ellis researched the experiences of former CIA operatives and read books about the agency. One of his biggest takeaways was the isolation that can accompany the work.

“You can’t talk to anyone about it. You can’t share any of your feelings about it,” he explains. “You have to just sit on it and live with it, and it lives inside of you.”

That understanding became fundamental to how Ellis approached Colin. Rather than immediately revealing the character's history or emotional wounds, he wanted audiences to slowly piece together who Colin might actually be.

“I was always keen with Colin to never go too far too soon,” Ellis says. “I don’t want him to talk about his parents. I don’t want him to talk about exes. I want him to be enigmatic in that sense.”

That sometimes meant actively removing material from scripts that Ellis felt revealed too much. The mystery surrounding Colin isn't simply a storytelling device. Ellis recalls asking showrunner Mike Weiss whether something Colin said in a script was actually true. The answer was more complicated: it might not be true, but Colin has repeated the story enough that he has begun believing it himself. This opened up an interesting space for Ellis to determine his own truth of the character.

“They start to create their own narrative in their head about their existence,” Ellis says, “and spend so much time not as themselves that they forget who they were in the first place.”

For Colin, establishing trust is another tool of the trade. Whether identifying someone's vulnerability, finding common ground or sharing a carefully selected piece of his own supposed history, everything can be deployed in service of an operation.

“You try and find a way in and you try and coax them into trusting you,” Ellis explains. “Unashamedly, you lie while you’re doing it in order to get what you need out of the situation.”

One storyline sees Colin developing feelings for an asset who believes he is someone entirely different. While Colin might convince himself he remains completely in control, Ellis sees something much more complicated happening beneath the surface.

“The reality is it’s impossible not to let some of those feelings penetrate you,” he says. “At some point this operation is going to end and you’re going to have to end it and you’re going to have to move on. And how do you live with yourself after that?”

For Ellis, that's where the series enters particularly fascinating territory: examining not only what CIA operatives do, but what doing it repeatedly might eventually do to them.

Despite that darker material, Ellis was adamant that CIA should have humor. The series exists within the established world of Dick Wolf procedurals, but Ellis wanted the characters' humor to become part of how they survive the extreme circumstances surrounding them.

“They get through that by being humorous about it, by having gallows humor and that kind of banter back and forth,” he says. “That’s a coping mechanism for them.”

The goal wasn't to undermine the stakes, but to use humor as an authentic response to them while also giving CIA its own identity.

“It’s got action, it’s got mystery. It’s got emotional beats in it as well,” Ellis says. “You find yourself feeling for these characters, but you’re laughing with them as well.”

Making Colin British also helped Ellis unlock that side of the character. Originally written as American, Colin became British following Dick Wolf's decision, allowing Ellis to incorporate a distinctly dry, sardonic sensibility without pushing the character into caricature. It also immediately heightened the differences between Colin and Nick Gehlfuss' Bill.

“We wanted these characters to seem very different from each other, be poles apart in their philosophies and who they were as people, but they had a common goal,” Ellis explains. “That’s what brought them together.”

That odd-couple dynamic gradually develops into one of the emotional foundations of the series. Ellis points to something as seemingly simple as Colin's use of the word “mate” as a marker of how much the relationship has changed.

“I don’t use it early on. I use it when it gets to a certain point in a relationship,” he says. “When Colin calls someone mate, you know that he likes that person.”

By the middle of the season, Bill witnesses Colin at one of his lowest moments, allowing the normally guarded operative to open up, if only slightly. From there, their initially reluctant partnership begins becoming something much more meaningful.

“Against his better judgment, Colin actually really likes Bill,” Ellis says. “And Bill really likes Colin against his better judgment.”

Their real-life relationship helped that evolution, too. Ellis says he and Gehlfuss became close while filming the first season, with their growing off-screen shorthand naturally feeding into Colin and Bill's on-screen chemistry.

The season finale, “Broken Glass,” finally gives Ellis the opportunity to let some of Colin's carefully contained emotion escape. After spending the season projecting control, Colin finds himself profoundly off balance when confronted by Toni. Even the physical presence of a gun something the character has deliberately avoided carrying changes the dynamic.

“It was a really visceral kind of experience as an actor,” Ellis recalls. “I didn’t have any sort of pre-planned thoughts about that moment.”

Instead, he allowed the confrontation to unfold instinctively, with Colin effectively becoming paralyzed by the collision between what he has told himself he should do and what he can actually bring himself to do. For Ellis, the emotional payoff worked precisely because the series had resisted revealing too much too soon.

“If Colin had just been an open book for 12 episodes, it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as interesting,” he says. “He was just holding all this stuff in.”

Interestingly, Ellis helped create that accumulation by deliberately avoiding learning too much about Colin's future. Rather than asking writers for answers about what was coming, he allowed himself to discover the character piece by piece alongside the scripts.

“I was quite willing to be sort of spoon-fed bit by bit Colin’s innermost thoughts,” he says. “It sort of helped in that way.”
That journey leaves Colin in an intriguing position heading into Season 2. His experience with Tony has given him another reason to distrust people, but at precisely the same moment, his relationship with Bill has become stronger than ever.

“I think at this stage Colin and Bill’s trust is kind of cemented — as much as that can be for Colin,” Ellis says. “He’s finally got someone that he can lean on, and that becomes a very useful thing for him as we move forward into the second season.”

For a man who has built his life around never revealing exactly who he is, that friendship may ultimately prove more transformative than Colin would ever willingly admit.

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