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].”