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Serving up ‘Whiskey Cavalier’

Spy thriller’s stars say they’re excited about action, roles

By Rick Bentley, Tribune News Service
Published: March 1, 2019, 6:03am

LOS ANGELES — ABC’s new drama “Whiskey Cavalier” is the story of he spied, she spied where FBI super-agent Will Chase (code name Whiskey Cavalier) must work with the take-no-prisoners CIA operative Frankie Trowbridge (code name Fiery Tribune) to run an interagency team.

Their relationship is a mix of hatred, tension, mutual respect and competitiveness. Chase (Scott Foley) is a sentimentalist who is dealing with a broken heart after being dumped. Trowbridge (Lauren Cohan) would rather kick someone in the asterisk than show her true feelings.

Foley was excited to get to play a character that went against the spy guy norm.

“I have a very strong belief that it’s time to sort of reinvent that trope that is the leading man in an action series. To me, at least, something unrelatable to a lot of the tropes you see in the men that we know to save the world on the television shows we grew up on,” Foley says. “This is something that I think is modern and more interesting — for me, at least. It’s much more relatable to have a character like this than someone sort of stoic instead.”

Executive producers Dave Hemingson and Bill Lawrence have made it easy for the audience to believe Trowbridge can be so tough by casting Cohan. The British-American actress and model has been showing off her fighting and survival skills since 2011 on “The Walking Dead.”

Cohan jokes she’s so comfortable with the physical elements that she even does Foley’s stunts. She gets serious and adds that the strength of the show is how it can go from dealing with deep emotional issues to a huge fight sequence.

The part about playing Trowbridge Cohan finds the most appealing is she’s consistently unwilling to admit she is starting to trust her new partner, something that goes against the independence she has been working to master for years.

“So as the series progresses, at least as this first season progresses, Frankie does acquiesce to that truth. And, then we see if they can actually be friends,” Cohan says.

Their relationship grows amid gunbattles and explosions. All the scenes unfold at exotic locations around the world. “Whiskey Cavalier” doesn’t try to use a Hollywood backlot or set in Canada to fake the locations. The series opener after the Oscars has the team sent to Prague for their first official mission where Chase has to seduce the widow of a notorious shipping tycoon to gain access to a list of criminal clients.

Lawrence laments that despite the money being spent to film around the world, at least one member of a test audience who saw the first episode praised the production team for using such great special effects to make it look like a scene in Paris was shot there. Lawrence stresses that all the location shots were filmed in the real cities.

“We’re still going everywhere, and still even though it’s a cliche you’ve all heard the saying that ‘The setting of a location is a character,’ ” Lawrence says. “I think we are shooting for a good-time popcorn ride that people can’t believe that we’re actually doing this stuff and doing in these places, and you’ll see it in every episode.”

Foley and Cohan handle the action in those shots.

Foley comes to “Whiskey Cavalier” after starring in the intense TV drama “Scandal.” His other credits include “Fatal Vision,” “True Blood,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Unit.” “Whiskey Cavalier” reunites Foley with Lawrence, who produced the comedy series “Scrubs.”

The show is on 10 p.m. Wednesdays.

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