The high-octane trailer for the new NBC series “The Endgame” quick-cuts between explosions and car chases and cat-and-mouse dialogue between a criminal mastermind and a hardnosed officer of the law.

Glimpsed, too, is an FBI agent in a dark suit. He says intently into a cell phone, “A bank has just gotten hit by six gunmen.” Later, stepping briskly out of a vehicle, he winces as he sees blasts of water geyser up from manholes in the middle of policemen staking out the area.

Wait, isn’t that FBI agent Noah Bean, who grew up in Mystic?

Yes, it is. Bean is in the cast of “The Endgame,” which premieres at 10 p.m. Feb. 21.

He plays the FBI’s second-in-command, but that’s just the latest role for Bean, 43, whose career has spanned stage and screen. A couple of highlights of his earlier TV work: playing David Connor in “Damages” alongside stars Glenn Close and Rose Byrne, and portraying Ryan Fletcher in The CW’s “Nikita.”

Being back as a series regular is wonderful.

“I’m excited about (‘The Endgame’), and I’m very grateful, too, after being in the business now 20-plus years. These opportunities don’t always come together. You’re not really guaranteed. I’ve been very fortunate to work fairly steadily over that time, over a couple decades, but there’s been lean years … so being a regular on a network television show is definitely unique and special and something to appreciate, which I feel like I definitely am," Bean says.

"I feel very fortunate and very excited to be on this ride with all these good people.”

Bean describes “The Endgame” as a high-stakes thriller in which the lead characters played by Morena Baccarin (whose credits include “Homeland” and “Gotham”) and Ryan Michelle Bathé (who was on “Boston Legal” and had a recurring role on “This Is Us,” which stars her husband, Sterling K. Brown).

Baccarin portrays an international arms dealer who has been captured by the FBI. But even in captivity, she has managed to orchestrate robberies of seven banks across New York City.

Bathé and Bean are among the FBI agents scrambling to get to the bottom of what’s going on and to prevent other disasters from befalling the city.

“The show kind of functions in real time, each episode being a day, and so we’re running around various locations in New York City, trying to do some hostage negations and break people out of these different banks,” Bean says. “It is a very high-paced show and it’s a clever show. … I’ve been very impressed by the cleverness of these scripts and the production as a whole. Everybody has done a very good job of pulling this together, because it’s hard making television, especially big shows like this where we’re going to a lot of locations — we’re filming on Wall Street and all sorts of exciting places — but especially in the world we’re living in right now. There’s all sorts of other complications and difficulties of filming during the time of COVID.”

An ambitious agent

Bean plays Patrick Doak, who is assistant director in charge of the FBI. He’s an ambitious agent who has his sights set on raising his profile in the FBI.

“It’s been a really fun character to play because he is a little more gruff and a little bit more abrasive than some of the other characters that I’ve played, but he’s also a good guy. His intentions are good. But what he’s willing to do to get to where he needs to get can sometimes be a little questionable, but that’s fun. … That creates the drama and the conflict that can help drive the story forward," Bean says.

The role offers a nice balance of dialogue and action. Bean is sometimes inside command centers barking orders and sometimes running on the streets, “again, usually barking orders,” he says.

The director for “The Endgame” is Justin Lin, who is best known for helming three “Fast and Furious” movies as well as “Star Trek Beyond.” Creator/showrunner is Nicholas Wootton, who has been a writer and producer for such shows as “NYPD Blue” and “Scorpion.”

“The Endgame” already has generated a lot of buzz. TV Guide selected the show as an “Editors’ Choice.” NBC is enthusiastic enough about “The Endgame” to have created a 30-second spot about it specifically to run during the Super Bowl.

Filming in NYC

Filming for the first season is about halfway done, and Bean says, “It’s a joy. I haven’t shot in New York in quite a few years, and another very pleasant surprise on this was …. a lot of our crew is actually the same crew we had on ‘Damages.’ So I’m having all these deja vu moments on set. … It’s been this kind of fun homecoming to be with these people.”

He is also discovering new parts of the city he hadn’t known before, even though he lived in New York for 15 years.

“When you’re filming, you end up in corners of that city that you’ve never gone to, or you go to places you always knew but new doors open up and you see behind some of the walls that you walked by for years and years and years and end up in some magical ballroom. … We’re going into these shutdown banks and finding ourselves in old vaults and storage ways,” he says.

“Our stages are on Staten Island, which was actually the only borough that I think I had never been to in all my years here. I’ve now spent more time than I ever imagined on Staten Island.”

As for filming outdoors in New York City this winter, Bean deadpans, “It’s cold. There’s going to be some scenes where I’m doing my best just not to be shivering on camera, and the tears falling down my cheeks have nothing to do with the emotion of the scene but the pain of shooting in 15 degree weather. When you see the schedule, and you see, ‘Uh-oh, we’ve got an exterior night shoot, and it’s going to be about 20 degrees out,’ you can kind of prepare yourself for the worst and hope for the best.”

While he’s working in The Big Apple now, Bean’s home base is Los Angeles, which is where his wife, actress Lyndsy Fonseca, and their 4-year-old daughter Greta have been while he’s filming. He’s been able to travel back to California occasionally. On the day he spoke with The Day last week, they were coming to visit him in New York.

'Invasion' in the time of COVID

The family had also spent about four months in Mystic during the first wave of COVID.

In March 2020 when everything stopped because of the pandemic, Bean was about a week into working on his three episodes of the sci-fi series “Invasion” for Apple TV+, in New York.

With the shutdown, Bean and his wife and daughter retreated from New York to the house of his mother, Ruth Crocker, in Mystic. Bean’s best friend Chris Thorn and Thorn’s fiancée Megan Bartle came, too.

“We, all seven of us, just turned my mom’s house into a little commune,” Bean says. "It was amazing. Like everybody, we had our ups and downs through that initial quarantine, but it was a really wonderful time.”

Thorn and Bartle ended up getting married in Mystic during that period, and Bean conducted the ceremony.

Back to work

By the middle of 2020, a lot of productions were finally up and running. Fonseca stayed at Crocker’s house again when she was starring in the Hallmark movie “Next Stop, Christmas” that shot in southeastern Connecticut, including at the Essex Steam Train.

The Beans relocated to Vancouver while Fonseca was there filming the “Turner & Hooch” series for Disney+.

And then “Invasion” began shooting again. Bean recalls that Apple created something like the bubble that the NBA created at Disney World.

“Apple moved our production from the middle of New York City out to some stages on Long Island. They bought out a resort and they quarantined everybody involved in the show, from actors to production assistants to background actors to the drivers to the caterers. We had to do a 10-day hard quarantine where we weren’t allowed out of our rooms, except for an hour a day under supervision in the parking lot.”

“Invasion” premiered in October of 2021.

And now, of course, Bean is spending his time on “The Endgame” set.

While shows used to be dependent on what ratings they got for their primetime spot, there are now other ways to view a network show — NBC has the Peacock streaming service, for instance.

“Some shows that are airing on actual network primetime, even if they don’t get the numbers that (the network) would hope for in primetime, can still have a really healthy life on Peacock, on these streaming services. It’ll be interesting to see how people absorb this,” Bean says.

“I think we have a good shot. I hope that we get to tell this story for a long time. I think it should be a fun, exciting show.”

Becoming David Bowie

Noah Bean has been told that he resembles superstar David Bowie, although he demurs, "I think it depends on the angle and what weight I'm at."

Here's how close the physical similarity is: Bean was cast to portray Bowie in the 2016 HBO series “Vinyl,” which was produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger.

“That was really a terrifying dream come true,” Bean says.

One of the people who had made the Bean/Bowie comparison is Bean’s friend and fellow actor Bobby Cannavale. Cannavale starred in “Vinyl” as a record executive in the 1970s, and he called Bean about a future episode featuring the character of Bowie.

Bean read for the role and got it. (Bowie had to approve Bean’s casting; at the time of filming in 2015, Bowie was seriously ill, but that wasn’t publicly known.)

“I got the call that said you’ve booked it, which for a second was amazing and then turned into utter terror," Bean recalls. "I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have to do this now.’”

He did a deep dive into researching Bowie. HBO wanted Bean to lose weight, so he used the eight or nine days between the time he booked the role and the filming to work on that. He ran on a treadmill and listened to Bowie songs and interviews.

Then came the hair, makeup and clothing phase of the transformation.

“HBO is an incredible network for a reason, so their hair and makeup team and their wardrobe are really the best of the best,” Bean says.

The detail of their work was extraordinary. They crafted fake teeth for Bean. They dyed his eyebrows. They got him contact lenses so his eyes would resemble Bowie’s, with the distinctive one permanently dilated pupil.

On the day they were filming a scene where Bean was to perform “Suffragette City,” he had to get from the trailer to the theater in midtown Manhattan. It was rush hour, so the production assistant told Bean he needed to walk the three blocks to the theater; that would be much faster than taking a van.

“I’m in full Ziggy (regalia). I’ve got eight-inch platform shoes on, I’m in skintight Ziggy (clothes), with the hair, the makeup, my nails are done, everything. I say to the PA, ‘I can’t walk to set right now. I’m going to get murdered out there. I can’t walk down 9th Avenue like this!’” Bean recalls.

But he had to.

“I get out on the sidewalk. We start to walk down 9th Avenue. It’s packed. And nobody even blinks an eye. Typical New York. Everybody’s just trying to get to the subway. Finally, right as I crossed the street to go into the theater where we were filming, there was one guy from across the street who yells out (here, Bean adopts at thick New Yawk accent), ‘Hey, (expletive) you, David Bowie!’”

Bean laughs and says, “So New York.”