How a Criminal Minds star pivoted to a passion-project audio play about aliens

Some stories are small and humble, easily contained in a family home or familiar neighborhood. Others are vast, stretching out to space itself. The Signal, an eight-part audio drama from Audible and Fresh Produce Media that debuted on Amazon in December, is somewhere in between. 

Audio plays are making a comeback, succeeding off the back of podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale, The Amelia Project, or The Story Must Be Told. And as such, they’re attracting bigger talent, pulling in voice actors who previously did a lot of film and television, like The Signal’s Paget Brewster and Nate Corddry. For Brewster — who is best known for her role on Criminal Minds, among several other television credits — the audio drama was an unfamiliar format with unexpected challenges.

“I had never done an Audible Original before. I didn’t know what that experience would be like,” Brewster says. But when she got the call during the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, she felt drawn in. “But the first episode was so impressive and exciting, because it was all about hearing this signal received from space, proof of communication from another life form or another galaxy. I’m obsessed with that; I am a UAP [unidentified anomalous phenomena] enthusiast. I wanted the part very badly, and I was able to do it because Criminal Minds wasn’t in production.”

The Signal centers around a divorced couple who are forced back together in a high-stakes investigation based around a deep space transmission and a global government conspiracy. Brewster plays Dr. Veronica Chapel, a physicist who reunites with her journalist ex-husband Malcolm Feldman in pursuit of the truth.

Brewster has a history in narration and animation voice work in titles like DuckTales and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, but recording long-form audio content proved very different. “Nate and I were in almost all of the scenes together all the time. We both recorded at the same studio, but we were in separate audio studios, so the engineering studio was between Nate’s recording pod and my recording pod, and that’s the closest you’re going to get in a room to another voice actor right now. 

“It was very nice to be able to see him on Zoom, but I could also lean over and we could peer at each other through the engineer’s booth.”

For the Audible podcast, there were certain requirements that were different from her previous work on superhero projects or kids’ shows, which involved more isolated voice acting. “We were encouraged by our director [Mark Henry Phillips] to stay present in the scene. If Nate had a speech, Veronica would be listening, but there’s an active listening component that’s vocal. […] If the character was walking down the street, Mark would say, ‘OK, make walking-down-the-street noises. I need you to express vocally that you’re walking down the street.’”

While the project was outside Brewster’s wheelhouse, the relationship between Veronica and Nate provided a stabilizing element for her to approach the high-stakes, abstract conspiracy her character explores. “It’s two human beings facing each other, their past, and their relationship that ended badly, but they like each other, and they need to depend on each other for this enormous discovery that’s being hidden,” Brewster says. “The juxtaposition of two little beating-heart human beings and an enormous universe of possibility is what we paid attention to in our performances.”

What lies beyond Earth has become a recurring topic in the news lately, with many major news publications having a specific section for stories on UAPs and UFOs. The Pentagon has investigated government cover-ups on the matter, the FBI has an internal group dedicated to these discoveries, and the field has moved from conspiracy fodder to legitimate academic study.

The Signal doesn’t delve into the real-world headlines, which is the right choice. It avoids the material feeling outdated; no new revelations can come out that contradict the story. It also avoids veering into the political, as much of the narrative focus remains on the relationship between Veronica and Nate as they navigate both the conspiracy and the aftermath of their marriage. 

“I think the writers were aware that if you rely on the breaking news, you can’t tell this story of a thrilling hunt for the truth. It doesn’t make sense to incorporate real-life questions about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence when this story can tell its own search,” Brewster says. “This is a story that exists in its own world.”

All eight episodes of The Signal are now available on Audible.