Noah Centineo’s New Netflix Role? A Lawyer for the CIA in The Recruit

Noah Centineo is somewhere in Washington, D.C., preparing for the second premiere of his new Netflix series, The Recruit. In the show, created by Alexi Hawley and inspired by the life of Vanity Fair contributor Adam Ciralsky, Centineo plays Owen, a lawyer who starts working for the CIA and immediately gets in over his head. Ahead of the premiere, Ciralsky set up a meeting at the real CIA headquarters in Virginia, where Centineo met real CIA attorneys and analysts and peppered them with questions about their jobs. He was delighted when some of them shot back with the agency’s infamous non-response: “We can neither confirm nor deny.”

“That’s my favorite,” Centineo says excitedly over Zoom, alongside Hawley and Ciralsky. “We were trying. At least three times, we got one of those [replies].”

“We got that, and we got, ‘I’m not prepared to speak to that,’” Hawley adds. “Which I feel  is perfect for the CIA, but could work in really any profession.”

For Ciralsky, the visit to the CIA felt like a “homecoming.” 

“It was that weird feeling of life imitating art imitating life,” he says with a laugh. “It had all the trappings of the CIA that I remember, but it’s a totally different institution.”

These days, Ciralsky is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist and producer. However, he began his career as an attorney for the secretive agency. The Recruit, executive produced by Ciralsky and Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith), is inspired by those early days, telling the story of a baby lawyer who has to figure out the identity of a mysterious woman threatening to “graymail,” or reveal state secrets, about the CIA in order to get exonerated. Owen (Centineo) has to put a stop to this, while also dealing with the everyday foibles of youth—living with roommates, doing chores, and trying to land the occasional date. 

For Hawley, a seasoned TV show runner behind hits like The Rookie, the idea felt fresh, offering the chance to tell a grounded, original CIA story. He was fascinated by the concept of graymail, which hasn’t yet permeated pop culture, as well as by the way Ciralsky described the agency’s office culture. “One of the things Adam said to me very early on was that the CIA is not sexy,” he says. “It’s the Post Office with secrets.” Across films and television, spy stories are dominated by James Bond-esque narratives, but Hawley was excited to look at it through an institutional lens. “Bureaucracies are just inherently dysfunctional and absurdist and petty,” he says. 

Still, The Recruit isn’t just a workplace show. Centineo’s character is thrust into action, trotting to foreign locations and getting into dangerous scrapes. Bullets are sprayed, blood spilled, and fingernails torturously pulled off—a reminder, Ciralsky notes, that the show isn’t literally based on his life. “I have all my fingernails,” he says. 

“They grow back!” Centineo retorts. 

For Centineo, the show is a step in a new direction, a sign of his expanding relationship with Netflix. Back in 2018, he became the streamer’s heartthrob-in-residence after starring in the teen romantic comedies Sierra Burgess Is a Loser and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, which was followed up with two well-received sequels. Though he’s since starred in high-profile action fare like the DC comic book adaptation Black Adam and the Charlie’s Angels reboot, The Recruit will be a surprise to a segment of Centineo’s fanbase, who have come to associate his Netflix projects with the romcom genre. “Obviously, I love Netflix and I want to continue working with them,” Centineo said. “[But] I knew I didn’t really want to do another romantic comedy.” 

When he read the pilot for The Recruit, which wasn’t attached to a streamer or network yet, he felt like this could be an organic way to shake things up: “It felt like a natural next step.” He signed on as an executive producer and helped bring it to Netflix. “It was pretty easy to get a meeting,” he says. “Alexi pitched the hell out of it and they were pretty much sold.”