'CIA' Dresses Tom Ellis to the Nines for an Undercover Mission in New Look at Season 2 [Exclusive]

1 week ago 30

Tom Ellis glances to his right in CIA Season 2

Published Oct 15, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

Ryan O'Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided's CubbiesCrib. Whether it's taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what's going on. Outside of entertainment, he's a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor's in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.

Bill Goodman (Nick Gehlfuss) and Colin Glass (Tom Ellis) are officially getting back into the rhythm of things with Season 2 of the FBI spin-off spy thriller, CIA. After forging a rare trust despite their differing approaches to keeping the country safe and enduring a twisty Season 1, the strait-laced FBI agent and his unpredictable CIA counterpart reunited to take down a dangerous cartel fixer with some aid from Special Agent Stuart Scola (John Boyd) and help a Russian spy betrayed by his comrades. One thing the two haven't done, however, is lean on an espionage staple and go on an undercover operation together. That's about to change with Episode 4, "Black Tie Optional."

CIA's latest case involves a sinister plot that could plunge the U.S. into war. A wealthy investor has begun funneling sensitive information to Korean operatives, with the prospect of an invasion from enemy forces on the table. To prevent that reality from coming to pass, the entire team must go undercover at a high-end gala event, with Nick and Colin at the center of the plan. While it may be a "Black Tie Optional" affair, they'll have to dress up for the occasion to blend in. Ahead of the episode's premiere on CBS, Collider can exclusively share a look at the agents' respective disguises for the evening, and the crowded environment they'll have to navigate while completing their mission.

Our first image shows Colin trading his usual rugged attire of jackets and crewnecks for a black suit with a bow tie and glasses, transforming his look from his usual on-the-job wardrobe. Ellis is no stranger to appearing in style, having previously played the titular sharp-dressed eponymous Lucifer in the supernatural mystery procedural, but his new look is the center of attention in the still, as he appears to have something important in his sight. Bill, meanwhile, is posing as a member of the press with a badge while mingling with a woman in another shot. It remains to be seen how the odd couple agents and their allies, Gina Gosian (Natalee Linez) and Nikki Reynard (Necar Zadegan), navigate the lavish setting while trying to keep a low profile and find what they're looking for.

Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard

Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.

🐕Wick

🏁Fast

🧨Mission

🎄Die Hard

FIND YOUR FRANCHISE →

How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.

ASomeone recognises me, and the temperature in the room drops without a single word being said. BLoudly and warmly. I arrive with my people, and we're already laughing about something. CI'm the one who told everybody where to stand. I walked this room twice before anyone else arrived. DBy accident. I wasn't supposed to be here, and now I'm the only one who can do anything about it.

NEXT QUESTION →

It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.

AEconomical and devastating. Trained technique, no wasted motion, finished before most people notice it started. BLoud, heavy and weirdly joyful. I'm not elegant, I hit like a truck, and I always have backup. CTo plan, until the plan breaks. Then I improvise at full sprint and refuse to stop moving. DBadly, honestly, and with a lot of swearing. I take more damage than I deal and I still don't go down.

NEXT QUESTION →

Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.

ANobody. I have contacts, favours and people who owe me, but when it begins I work alone. BEveryone. My people are the entire point, and I'd trade the whole mission for any one of them. CA small hand-picked team I trust completely, and I'd still take the worst part of the job myself. DA voice on the other end of a radio and a building full of people who don't know I exist.

NEXT QUESTION →

It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of.

AFocus, commitment and sheer will. Grief is fuel if you point it in the right direction. BThe people counting on me. I don't appear to have a limit when it's family on the line. CRefusing to accept the odds. Somebody has to do the impossible part, and it's going to be me. DSpite, mostly. And a growing sense that these people picked the wrong building.

NEXT QUESTION →

There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.

AA black muscle car I am unreasonably attached to, and I will dismantle an entire empire over it. BSomething impossibly modified, at impossible speed, off an impossible ramp. Physics is a suggestion. CA motorbike at full throttle through a city I memorised last night. And then off a cliff. DA borrowed car, badly, while somebody in the passenger seat politely asks me to slow down.

NEXT QUESTION →

How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.

AThere are rules and I respect them absolutely, right up until somebody breaks one against me. BI don't take orders. I take care of people, and everything else tends to sort itself out. CI serve the mission, not the memo. If my people are in danger, the orders come second. DThey're in a van outside telling me what I'm doing wrong while I'm the one bleeding on broken glass.

NEXT QUESTION →

Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.

ASomething was taken from me that can't be replaced, and I've been settling that account ever since. BBelonging. I built a family out of people who had nowhere else, and I'll defend it with everything. CThe conviction that if I stop, people die. I don't know how to hand that to anyone else. DI just wanted to get through the holidays with my family. Everything after that was self-defence.

NEXT QUESTION →

When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.

AThat I was a myth people warned each other about in whispers, and that they were right to. BThat I never left anyone behind, the door was always open, and there was always a place at the table. CThat I did the impossible part myself, every single time, and never asked anyone to risk it for me. DThat I was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who turned out to be very hard to kill.

REVEAL MY FRANCHISE →

Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…

Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.

John Wick

You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.

The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work.

Fast & Furious

You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.

This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason.
You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.

Mission: Impossible

You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.

This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error.
You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.

Die Hard

You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.

Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable.
You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

'CIA' Season 2 Will Bring Bill and Colin Closer Together as Brothers

"Black Tie Optional" will also continue to wrestle with the death of Bill's father. In the premiere, while still mourning his loss, the FBI agent learns his dad was CIA, which created all manner of questions about his past. Colin assured that they would figure out what it meant together, but it undoubtedly reshapes how Bill views his father, his own career with the FBI, and his participation in the fusion cell. Like the mole in Season 1, his family history will be the overarching mystery for the two agents to unravel, and by the end, according to showrunner Mike Weiss, they may even realize how similar they are deep down. In an interview with TV Insider, Weiss described how the journey Bill and Colin are on in Season 2 deepens the connection between them while shaking up Bill's arc as the season progresses.

"It felt like a way to fundamentally alter Bill’s understanding of his family and his dad who he held up as a hero, and then for him to realize that on some level, he and Colin, by the end of this long journey that they’re going to go on to get to the bottom of this, are more similar in ways that he couldn’t have possibly predicted when they first met. So if your dad was CIA and your new best friend who you love and hate in equal measure, Colin, is also CIA, I mean, it’s almost as if we’re saying on some level, these two are brothers. This is a story about two people who find each other as adults, and on some deep level, they really are brothers more even than just friends and colleagues. And so I don’t know exactly what idea came in what order in terms of how we wanted to tell that part of the story, but it felt like a way to link these two guys in a really, hopefully surprising way."

CIA Season 2, Episode 4 premieres on CBS on Monday, October 26. Check out our exclusive images in the gallery above.