The Agency: Michael Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright get into character for Paramount Plus’ remake of The Bureau

With two Academy Award nominations and a resume littered with critically and commercially successful films, it’s easy to forget Michael Fassbender got his start in the entertainment industry on the small screen. Way back in 2001, a bright-eyed young Irish actor with a German father made his debut as Pat Christenson in the acclaimed World War II mini-series, Band Of Brothers. The show was created by no less than Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, so there are certainly worse ways to get your foot in the door. A variety of small roles in shows and made-for-TV movies followed, until he received his first award in 2004. Well, technically, it wasn’t HIS award, because it was Fassbender’s performance in a Guinness commercial at the time that earned recognition for the ad agency, but trophies with his name engraved on them would soon come. Some might say his big break came as a young Spartan soldier in Zack Snyder’s highly-stylised 2006 sword-and-sandal epic, 300, while others point to a scene-stealing turn as a British commando in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. But for every blockbuster, such as X-Men: First Class or Prometheus, there are two or three low-budget indie films, in which this actor seems to revel in pushing the limits of performance. Dropping down to just 57kg to play a starving Irishman in Steve McQueen’s historical drama, Hunger. Then reuniting with McQueen a few years later to play a sex addict in the haunting erotic drama, Shame. Fassbender is no stranger to risks, of course. When he’s not on set, or spending time with his wife, Swedish Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, and their two sons at their home in Portugal, the 47-year-old races a Porsche 911 in the European Le Mans Series. There seems to be little risk in his latest venture, however. A return to the small screen to star in an espionage series for Paramount Plus. Nothing is guaranteed in this industry, but The Agency is about as close to a sure thing as you can get. Based on the hit French series The Bureau, or more correctly Le Bureau Des Legendes, The Agency is a spy thriller set within the CIA department responsible for training and handling deep-cover agents. These agents are embedded in foreign countries such as Ukraine or Ethiopia on long-term missions, living under false identities for years. Fassbender plays an agent codenamed “Martian” (a version of The Bureau character played by Mathieu Kassovitz) who returns from a six-year mission in Addis Ababa to an agency office in London. Martian must re-adapt to his own life, while dealing with the lingering effects of being someone else for so long, all while significant covert operations are unravelling around him. That alone is reason enough to tune in but wait until you hear what else this production has in store. The first two episodes are directed by British filmmaker Joe Wright, whose previous work for the big screen includes the 2007 war drama Atonement and 2017’s Darkest Hour, which won Gary Oldman an Oscar for playing Winston Churchill in the biopic. Talking about Academy Awards, starring alongside Fassbender is Oscar-nominee Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction), part of an impressive cast that includes Katherine Waterston from the Fantastic Beasts franchise, John Magaro (Past Lives) and Jodie Turner-Smith (Queen & Slim). But, wait, there’s more — The Agency also has an extremely fun turn from Richard Gere, and George Clooney is attached as a producer. So, for Fassbender, this series had all the prestige of making a movie, just on a very different production timeframe. “I guess the main difference is the luxury of time that you have on a film,” he says over a Zoom call with STM. “I mean, even with an independent film, you know, let’s say something like Shame, which we shot in 25 days, so you’re pretty pushed for time there. “But (on The Agency) we’re shooting an episode every two weeks . . . everything just moves faster, and I like that about it. “(Another difference is) just learning more words, more lines, for 10 hours (of TV episodes) as opposed to two (hours of dialogue for a movie).” Wright is sitting next to Fassbender on the call, and has also worked at the highest level when it comes to movies, from James Bond and Hunger Games blockbusters, to playing Commissioner Gordon in the latest Batman reboot. But Wright has also had starring roles in TV shows with film-esque production values, such as Boardwalk Empire and, most notably, Westworld. “I wasn’t sure that I was going to do another series so soon after Westworld, but I had heard about this project,” Wright reveals to STM. “I tend to lean toward things that are political, probably too much, so (The Agency) was compelling for me. “And I think the reasons that it was compelling for me are the reasons that it will be ideally compelling to an audience, too.” Fassbender’s connection to the material goes back even further. “I’d watched Le Bureau Des Legendes, I think in 2019 or 2020, maybe in a lockdown period with Alicia,” he says. “When I watched, I was like, ‘I wonder what I could do with that character’, because I found it a really fascinating world. “But, in terms of preparation, it’s always the same with me — I just spend a lot of time with the script, and that means many, many hours with the character.” Fassbender says he doesn’t “intellectualise too much” while preparing for a role, preferring to get to the nuts and bolts of his character’s backstory. “(Martian’s) job is highly stressful, so where’s his outlet,” Fassbender explains. “Is it alcohol? Is it painkillers? I’m asking all these sorts of questions as I’m working through the script, and then, in the end, the character just kind of arrives.” Wright plays deputy station chief Henry in The Agency, a character who plays by the book in a world where little is what it seems on the surface. “Obviously, The Agency gets into things that could be morally ambiguous, ethically ambiguous, and so how do you keep your centre inside of that,” Wright says of his character’s motivations. “So, really in that way he sets an edge — a straight arrow that everyone kind of orbits around.” Kiwi director Taika Waititi, who worked with Fassbender on the sports comedy Next Goal Wins, once described the Irishman as an impossibly cool, old-school movie star: something akin to a real-life James Bond. The Agency offers a very different portrait of a spy, even if it does have 007’s trademark beautiful femme fatale in Turner-Smith. “Everyone likes James Bond,” Fassbender says. “You know, escapism, fantasy, that’s an element that I think is just enjoyable for people. “But we’ve seen with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and various other spy films that are out there, that it’s a lonely profession and there’s not much glamour attached to it.” The realism extends to the plot, which is drawn from the pages of newspapers. Wright wonders how a second season might be different, given the momentous events in US politics recently. “(The screenwriters) have kind of used the headlines and used dynamics and geopolitics right now to shape this stage that we play on,” he says. “What I’m really curious about is what will happen next season, because there’s a lot of shifting sand out there, and the landscape will be very different.” And it’s fair to say Wright, who is renowned for playing intellectually advanced characters, doesn’t equate “different” with “better”. “Whatever we’ll be dealing with will be of a lower level of intelligence and a higher level of cynicism, ignorance and lunacy,” he laments. “And consequence,” Fassbender adds. The Agency is streaming on Paramount Plus from November 30.