Why Michael Fassbender’s CIA Drama ‘The Agency’ Is Set in April 2023
[This story contains spoilers from the first two episodes of The Agency.]
The Michael Fassbender-starring TV series The Agency, like many other recent political thrillers, is set amid the backdrop of real-life geopolitical events like the Ukraine-Russia war, with the conflict fueling key plot points in the series.
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But with the CIA drama, which also stars Richard Gere, making its debut on Paramount+ With Showtime just weeks after the 2024 U.S. presidential election that could usher in foreign policy changes via Donald Trump’s second term, it’s possible that the state of affairs in Eastern Europe could change significantly in 2025.
Luckily, The Agency already took steps to insulate the world of the show. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at The Agency‘s New York premiere last month, director and executive producer Joe Wright explained that early on, as The Agency team was working on making its U.S. version of the French series Le Bureau des Légendes, trying to update the nearly 10-year-old series, “events kept on overtaking us.”
“So we realized we had to actually be more specific and plant our pin somewhere, so we went for April 2023,” Wright, who helmed the first two episodes of the series, said of setting the show at a specific point in recent history.
Selecting that time also helps with another element of The Agency‘s geopolitical backdrop, the war in Sudan, as the series is set before an attack in Khartoum that would have drastically altered the environment and storyline in the show.
“One of our characters goes to Khartoum to be a lecturer there. If we’d set it in September 2023, there was no university left,” Wright explained.
International turmoil isn’t the only way The Agency reflects real life. Fassbender and Saura Lightfoot-Leon, who plays young agent trainee Danny, worked with real CIA agents to try to understand their undercover characters.
While Lightfoot-Leon said she spoke to people in the CIA and did the “academic research” of listening to “lots of podcasts” and reading up extensively on world news, Fassbender explained that the people he spoke to helped him understand the psychological makeup of his mysterious character, Martian.
“I spoke to somebody that was involved in the agency, and then I spoke to somebody else. That person actually was very helpful to me because I was trying to define the sort of character that the Martian was, and there’s definitely sociopathic elements to the character, but I do think he’s trying to wrestle with the type of person he might’ve been before,” Fassbender explained. “What’s unusual about this character is he’s six years out in the field, non-official, that doesn’t really happen. That would be a very rare thing. Certainly you’d come back pretty fragmented after being out that long. In a way he’s his own boss out there so he’s in control of his own destiny, and when he comes back again, he has to get re-institutionalized into the agency, and that’s difficult because now he’s got to answer to people. Again those sociopathic tendencies where rules are fine for other people but they don’t apply to him [come into play]. The battle for his soul is what I really always thought it was about between his love interest in Sami [Jodie Turner-Smith] and the relationship with his daughter that has suffered — those human elements of him that have been shattered in a lot of ways and he’s trying to put them back together.”
Meanwhile, Harriet Sansom Harris, who plays Dr. Blake, a behavioral psychologist sent to evaluate the mental health of the agents, didn’t choose to study any real-life counterparts in the CIA. Instead, she went off of the personalities of her lawyer family members.
“She’s really just there to get under people’s skin and not to undermine but to reveal and to get to the truth,” Harris said. “There are a lot of lawyers in my family, so I just kind of grew up with that attitude of you just pursue it. And you don’t give ground. And I don’t think you have to read a lot of stories about what’s that kind of person like. You don’t care if they like you.”
Fassbender, Turner-Smith and other actors familiar with the French show also had that earlier project as a way in to their characters.
“I had sort of the template of the French show, so I got to really look at that and think where is this going to go, what’s this going to be but obviously [writers] Jez and John-Henry [Butterworth] are putting their own spin on it,” Turner-Smith said. “Yes, it will be very similar to the French show. It is going to be our take with this cast. The producers have always been very transparent about what they want and where it’s going and very collaborative and very encouraging.”
Fassbender, who watched Le Bureau during the pandemic, though he could only track down the first two seasons, felt that he couldn’t escape the original.
“It was always there,” he said. But, ultimately, The Agency became its own thing.
“I loved Mathieu [Kassovitz]’s portrayal,” Fassbender said. “What I liked about what he did was that thing of you can’t spot a spy. They kind of have to be nondescript, nothing too memorable about what they do. And I like that about him. He’s the person in the room that you wouldn’t suspect. Now I think my Martian’s a little bit more ego aggressive, if that’s even a phrase, but there was a blueprint there that I could respect and elements that I thought, ‘Well that was really smart what he did.’ And then as it went, it just started organically taking its own life, what I was doing. I wasn’t intellectualizing too much about things, just working very closely with the script, a lot of repetition with that and just trying to distill the characters from the page.”
Alex Reznik, who plays the Belarus-based undercover agent Coyote, noted that there’s a French counterpart to his character. But much like Fassbender, he found himself more focused on the toll years of being “isolated from your previous life and your family” takes on his character.
“In Martian’s case, he’s been away for six years and now he gets to come home. In my case, I’m in the trenches, four or five years into it. I haven’t spoken to my family in so many years. The only information I get is whatever my handler, played by John Magaro, gives me. So that whole element of what is it like to live in that lonely, isolated world and where does the lie bleed in with reality I think is going to be a fun, interesting part to look at as the series progresses.”
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The first two episodes of The Agency are now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime. Episodes drop weekly, streaming Friday and then on the Showtime cable network at 9 p.m. on Sunday nights.
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