“The Recruit”'s“ ”Noah Centineo Says Filming at the Real CIA Headquarters for Season 2 Felt Like 'Going Home': 'I Belong Here' (Exclusive)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for season 2 of The Recruit.

The Recruit season 2 took Noah Centineo's character Owen Hendricks all over the world — from Washington, D.C. to Qatar to Seoul, South Korea to the small towns of Russia. While the actor himself didn't get to go to all those places, he did knock quite a few off his list.

"We didn't go to Russia. We didn't go to Qatar," Centineo, 28, tells PEOPLE. South Korea and Vancouver, Canada, though, were all real stops along the way — and his time in the nation's capital was particularly cool.

"We shot at the CIA," he says of the agency's campus located in McLean, Va., just outside of Washington. "They gave us clearance, which is insane. I think we were the first show to shoot at the new headquarters too."

Related: Noah Centineo Says His Dad's Friends 'Want to Have Beers with Me Now' Thanks to The Recruit

It turns out it wasn't his first time in the government building. "I'd actually been there before for prep," he shares, which was "super immersive," given he plays a rookie CIA lawyer in the Netflix series. "We met with some analysts and some lawyers there too before [Alexi Hawley] finished writing the second season."

Since he'd "been there before," Centineo says he wasn't nervous filming there. Instead, he felt like, "I belong here." He adds, "It was like going home, weirdly."

Generally speaking, Centineo gives the impression that the role doesn't really require him to do many things out of his comfort zone — CIA headquarters visits included. Despite the seemingly endless trouble Owen constantly finds himself in, there "wasn't a lot of preparation" needed on the actor's end.

"Owen's not trained to fight, so he doesn't have to properly know how to kill people. So I just get to show up and do my best and it works with the character," the actor says.

He continues, "If anything, [it's about] just kind of dumbing down what it looks like to throw a punch or to tackle someone, and using brute force over any sort of calculated strategy."

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Humor is a big part of the series, too, which makes sense given how green Centineo's character truly is. He's supposedly only been at the CIA for a matter of weeks — "if that," as he puts it.

"This season in particular, it was very hard to not break," he says of the humor interlaced with the espionage plot. "We all get together and it's just so [hard]. And Teo [Yoo] is so funny. Oh my God, yeah. He was hilarious."

According to Netflix, season 2 sees Owen "pulled into a life-threatening espionage situation in South Korea, only to realize that the bigger threat just might be coming from inside" the CIA, and picks up right where season 1 left off.

One fun perk of filming part of the season in Seoul was that Centineo got to reunite with his To All the Boys I've Loved Before costar Anna Cathcart for a sweet cameo in XO, Kitty season 2. While that was "daunting," as he told PEOPLE, he'd do "anything to support" Cathcart, 21.

"It's extremely scary. Peter Kavinsky and To All the Boys, I mean that franchise is so beloved that you kind of don't want to touch it," he admitted.

Still, it was an easy yes when producer Matt Kaplan called. "[He] just said, 'Hey, you're shooting in Seoul at the same time we are. Would you do this?' I said, 'Absolutely,' " Centineo recalled.

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Season 2 of The Recruit is now streaming on Netflix.

Read the original article on People