'Undercovers': Meet Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the 'brilliant' Samantha Bloom

We're one day away from the premiere of NBC's "Undercovers" on Wednesday, Sept. 22 at 8 p.m. ET and we still have a couple more people we'd like you to meet.

Next up, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays Samantha, one-half of the Blooms, the spy couple who you'll come to care about very much. "Dr. Who" fans already know Mbatha-Raw from when she played recurring character, Tisha Jones. Now as one of the leads of the new NBC show, Mbatha-Raw tells Zap2it that despite all the hype around the new J.J. Abrams show, she's not nervous.

"I'm really excited actually," she says. "I kind of generally speaking try to change nervous energy into adrenaline and excitement in any situation, so I'm really looking forward to it."

This is the British actress' first foray into American TV and she's not taking it for granted. "A year ago, I had never been to America," she says. "So, yeah, this is a crazy experience, but an amazing one."

In "Undercovers," Mbatha-Raw plays Samantha Bloom, an ex-spy who's drawn back into the game along with her husband, Steven (played by Boris Kodjoe), when their friend goes missing. While other spy shows may have the ongoing "Will they? Won't they?" romantic thread, this show cuts to the chase. That doesn't mean that there isn't some romantic entanglement that goes on, though.

"It's still complicated by the dynamic of Leo [played by Carter MacIntyre]," Mbatha-Raw tells us. "Who is also one of their fellow agents who used to date Samantha. So, there are a few complications there. And secrets emerge as we go through the series about other characters and other relationships of the past. So, yeah, it's not as simple as it seems at first.

When you meet Samantha, we think you'll like her. Besides being gorgeous, she has all kinds of other things going for her.

"She's so warm and so caring, but she's also very strong," says Mbatha-Raw. "We get to do all these fight scenes and I get to run through the streets of Venezuela and knock people out with things. She's just brilliant. She's athletic and she's kind of creative in the kitchen, as well. She's really quite a multifaceted character."