A week after her long-running series The Handmaid’s Tale came to an end, UK fans can now binge an ‘underrated’ thriller starring Elisabeth Moss.
Released on Hulu in the US and on Disney Plus locally last year, The Veil was written by Steven Knight, best known for creating Peaky Blinders and SAS: Rogue Heroes.
Ahead of its release, it was teased the cat-and-mouse storyline would appeal to fans of Killing Eve and promised to keep viewers on the edge of their seats.
‘The Veil explores the surprising and fraught relationship between two women who play a deadly game of truth and lies on the road from Istanbul to Paris and London,’ the official synopsis said.
‘One woman has a secret, the other a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost. In the shadows, mission controllers at the CIA and French DGSE must put differences aside and work together to avert potential disaster.’
Elisabeth plays Imogen Salter, a veteran MI6 agent with a specialty in undercover work.
The Veil also stars Yumna Marwan as Adilah El Idrissi, a French woman suspected of being an ISIS leader planning an attack on the West, Dali Benssalah as Malik Amar, an agent with French intelligence agency DGSE and Imogen’s boyfriend, and Josh Charles as Max Peterson, an obnoxious CIA agent collaborating with Malik and Imogen.
After a two year wait for the show to hit screens, a year later UK fans can now finally also tune in for free. This week Channel 4 uploaded the entire series to its streaming service.
Although the six-episode series divided critics and fans, those who did love it gave glowing reviews.
‘Exciting and astonishing, The Veil beautifully balances stunt-filled escapades and a rich narrative,’ Variety wrote.
‘Overall, The Veil seems like a fun show to get lost in as you unravel the mystery each week,’ Common Sense Media shared.
‘By the end of the six episodes of The Veil, I was convinced that this is Moss’ best role, and best performance, yet. She’s amazing,’ NPR added.
Meanwhile fans said it was ‘utterly compelling’, ‘underrated’ and ‘full of constant twists’.
After her breakout role as Zoey Bartlet in The West Wing, Moss went on to star as Peggy Olson in Mad Men, before playing June/ Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, which ran from 2017 until this year.
Speaking to RTE ahead of the initial premiere of The Veil, the actress said this had been one of her hardest roles to date.
‘It was much more challenging than I’ve ever experienced given the different skills and different things I had to do with the dialect, the stunts, fight training, and speaking a couple of different languages here and there, and then traveling around the world, so it definitely felt like, if possible, I’ve found something even more challenging than The Handmaid’s Tale,’ she said.
During filming she even fractured a vertebrae in her back, an injury that left her lying on a roof in Istanbul for two hours.
After ‘hitting a wall the wrong way’ when undertaking a stunt, Moss was still determined to push on and was back on set the next day, but with limited mobility.
‘I didn’t know if we were going to be able to come back and shoot on this rooftop in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. It’s not like that is an easy thing to accomplish. But luckily, we, as a production, and then FX, thank God, let us go back and shoot it again. Which was incredible, an incredible opportunity,’ she told Variety.
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