Michael Fassbender is back. After a recent four-year hiatus (2020-2023) to pursue Formula One racing at Le Mans, he’s returned to acting with a vengeance.
In 2023, he played a perfectionist assassin in David Fincher’s “The Killer” (Netflix); an alcoholic soccer coach in Taika Waititi’s sports comedy “Next Goal Wins” (Searchlight); and took on his first TV series since his early years, as a London CIA agent in love with Jodie Turner-Smith’s Sudanese professor in “The Agency” (Paramount+/Showtime).
And, this week, his latest movie opens in theaters, Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag” (Focus), a rarity in today’s world: an original smart spy thriller for adults.
Fassbender is specializing in spies of late. In this witty British whodunit artfully written by Hollywood veteran David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “Spider-Man,” “Mission: Impossible”), the German-Irish Fassbender is George Woodhouse, a star spy at Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, happily married to another star spy, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett).
At the start of the film, George is given a list of five possible moles at his agency — his wife is on it. He tells her he’s tracking a traitor, but not that she’s a suspect. She’s in his “black bag,” the place where secrets are hidden.
When Fassbender first read the script, “it was a fantastic collection of characters,” he said on Zoom. “And it falls into the film demographic that we just don’t see a lot of these days. That it was going to get made was exciting. It’s hard for film companies to support films in that budget category, there’s not many $30 to $40 million films anymore, unfortunately.”
He continued, “As I started reading the script: ‘Wow, this is smart and funny.’ And it moved at a click. The pace at which I was propelled forward by these characters was exciting. And we were in this spy genre: the story wasn’t motivated by action set pieces, it was psychological warfare going on between these fascinating and intriguing characters. There are a couple of visceral moments in the film that are quite violent, for sure, but what’s propelling it forward are these crackling scenes of dialogue and intellect between these characters.”
At the start of the movie, George invites his agency suspects to dinner, and all hell breaks loose. Fassbender loved playing the two centerpiece dinner scenes, one introductory, the other climactic, which were the only ones rehearsed with the six actors (Fassbender, Blanchett, Tom Burke, Marisa Abela, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page).
“Steven Soderbergh sets up a relaxed atmosphere on set,” said Fassbender. “It’s fun to watch him come into a room, look around, light it, be the DP [director of photography], operate the camera, be the director, and then go home and edit whatever we shot that day. We move fast. He’ll operate 95 percent of the time. You’re always trying to develop a rapport with the person behind the camera, because you’re going to be doing a dance with them throughout. He has a lot of confidence in the way he casts it. It’s a choice of his not to interfere with whatever the players are bringing.”
At the first dinner party, George is taciturn behind his thick black glasses. “George doesn’t show a lot of emotion of any kind, really,” Fassbender said. “That was evident in the script, right from the first scene when he meets [fellow spy] Meacham with the list of five names. David Koepp had written that it is hard to read anything on George’s face, it’s a standard for him. But it was a lot of fun playing it. We [the actors] never talked between each other about relationships at all. There was a lot of trust in whatever the other person brought to the scene, and then you would respond accordingly.”
The dinner scenes were less a challenge for the six actors sitting around a table, than the director. “For us, it was an opportunity to all be together in one scene,” said Fassbender. “You don’t have to figure out any blocking. It was finding the rhythm between each other.” The rehearsal was for Soderbergh’s benefit. “He said those two scenes were keeping him up at night. It was where he was going to put the camera, the different angles he was going to find, keeping those scenes dynamic,” the actor said. “If handled the wrong way, it could just become flat and lose that tension that is so necessary.”
The real tension in the film is between this happily married couple. Will George do what he says and stay loyal to his wife, no matter what? “Yeah,” said Fassbender. “It’s not to say that he wouldn’t investigate fully to see her culpability in this scenario. If she is one of the traitors on this list, he’s still going to find that out. Then he’ll figure out what to do from there. He’s a process-driven individual. He’s analytical. He will gather all the pieces of evidence together before making any assumption and then take the next step. But for me, his loyalty always laid with his wife. It’s a lonely world. It’s an isolating world. What’s unique about the characters Kathryn and George: they have each other. None of the other characters have that.”
Marisa Abela (“Back to Black”) as younger agent Clarissa is struggling to find a balanced life as she dates a fellow agent (Burke). “How are you supposed to date anybody outside the agency?,” said Fassbender. “It’s impossible. She is the audience. She is the new person coming into this world. And I’ve always wondered what kind of person wants to become a spy or enter into this world of espionage. A lot of people are driven by idealism, and a real willingness to help their country, and patriotism. You can see through her that naivety and enthusiasm and idealism, and you can see the other characters that have been doing it for a while, the various levels of cynicism that come with that.”
Fassbender has had some recent practice using his spy muscles. In “The Agency,” a remake of hit French series “Le Bureau” written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (“Edge of Tomorrow,” “Ford v. Ferrari”), he plays Martian, an undercover CIA spy come in from the cold to London. We watch him adopt and shed different personae with his bosses (Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere), the in-house shrink (Harriet Sansom Harris), and his lover Samia (Turner-Smith). With her, his face opens and shows emotions, and when he leaves her, closes again.
“It’s that idea of spies being forgettable,” said Fassbender. “They would enter a room and leave it and you would never remember that person. So it’s trying to find a balance of not having that on screen, so an audience forgets you, but staying true to it, and then finding the moments where you can see the real human being come through. Martian lies and tells the truth. He’s lost the compass where the lies start and end. With his daughter Poppy, he tells these inconsequential lies. Why did he do that? It becomes second nature, that idea of your resting place being that steeped in paranoia that you could never leave that paranoid itch alone, because you might die, it might be the end of you.”
He added, “I knew that I could show some signs of the human being with Samia and Poppy. You get a peek into what he might have been like, or what he is like. But you never really know, because it could also be a performance for them as well, consciously or subconsciously, because he’s just been lying so for so long.”
Carrying a ten-episode TV series was an adjustment. “This was a definitely different experience,” said Fassbender, “just the volume of of dialogue, the speed that you work at. You don’t have the luxury of time that you would on a film set. You’ve got to make decisions fast, and move fast.”
The actor returns to the fray at the end of April when “The Agency” Season 2 starts shooting in London, Estonia, and Egypt. Fassbender is reading all the scripts now. “‘The Agency’ is a slow burn,” he said. “You have to lean in as an audience member and do a little bit of work, but then the payoff comes through as it starts to ramp up and the walls start closing in. And Season Tw2o, it just continues to tighten. It doesn’t let up.”
As if Fassbender didn’t have enough to do, he also joined the cast of scrappy Irish film “Kneecap” in 2023, playing an IRA officer and the father of one of the rappers at its heart. At the outset, it was far from clear that the movie would be a small arthouse hit for Sony Pictures Classics and wind up on the International Feature Film Oscar shortlist.
“I loved what they were doing,” said Fassbender. “As soon as I saw their music videos and what they were all about, I thought, ‘These guys are the real deal, and everything about them is genuine. There’s nothing contrived about them. They’re smart, they’re funny, and they’ve got an infectious energy. They’re born performers. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to do in life.’”
After putting the four “X-Men” and two “Alien” movies in the rear view, at age 47 Fassbender is in superb physical shape, but is less invested in action spectacle, “probably because I was younger and I could run around and bounce off the walls better than I can do today,” he said. “I’ve never had any fixed plan. I did make a conscious decision of taking a break. I was doing three, four films a year, sometimes. That wasn’t by design. Sometimes you sign up to something and there’s a delay. The next thing you know, three films are back to back. But I wanted to get into racing, and approach it seriously and give my time to it. And obviously it’s impossible for me to do a race season and film, just for insurance reasons alone. It was good for me to take a break and get some perspective and try something totally different.”
When Fassbender returned to acting with David Fincher on “The Killer,” he credits his Formula One racing with helping him adapt to the director’s meticulous perfectionism and multiple takes. “It’s fractional, the work you’re doing with him,” said Fassbender. “It’s as precise as when you’re racing and you’re coming back and you’re looking at the data and you’re analyzing corner to corner: ‘Did I lose a tenth of a second here or three tenths?’ So it was quite helpful.”
(While Fassbender did most of the assassin’s heart-rate-lowering yoga, “we did have somebody do that leg kick in the back,” he said.)
He sees similarities with Fincher and Soderbergh, who are good friends. “They’re directors who’ve worked in all the different departments on a film set,” said Fassbender. “They have a language for each department. They have a deep understanding of cinematic history, but different ways of executing what they want. [Fincher’s] belief is, the distillation of doing a scene a number of times is not just for performance, but for camera moves, for whatever is happening in the frame.”
Clearly, Fassbender, who has been married to fellow actor Alicia Vikander since 2017, is in a happy place. “I’m glad to be acting again,” he said, “because I realize it’s the only thing I can do.”
Focus Features releases “Black Bag” in theaters on Friday, March 14.
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