“Black Bag,” an elegant, quick-witted new thriller that finds Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender playing married spies, isn’t the pair’s first time together on screen. That honor goes to 2017’s “Song to Song,” one of Terrence Malick’s most intangible and head-scratching offerings — though the two stars can barely recall that experience.
“We walked past one another,” Blanchett says, scrunching her temples as if searching valiantly for the memory.
“In the scene,” Fassbender, who is sitting to her right during an interview at Manhattan’s Whitby Hotel, interjects, helpfully filling in the gaps. “There was a very wealthy gentleman who had allowed us to use his house and his cars in the film — so he was in the scene as well.”
It clicks. “That’s right,” Blanchett says excitedly. “Literally every day working with Terry was going fishing, and you didn’t know whether you catch anything, or if you caught anything, whether you’re going to eat it. So I don’t even know if I’m even in the movie or if Terry just wanted me to hang around for a couple of weeks. Anyway, I wouldn’t say Michael and I really worked together.”
The pair more than make up for any lost screentime with “Black Bag,” which finds them both at the center of a mystery. Fassbender’s character, George Woodhouse, is tasked with finding out the identity of a double agent who is trying to sell a deadly cyberweapon to foreign buyers. There are five suspects at the top-secret organization, including George’s wife Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett). That leaves George potentially facing a terrible choice.
“They have a strong marriage,” Fassbender says. “He feels like she’s in his corner. There’s a deep sort of respect and understanding of one another. So when this happens, for George, it’s like, where should his loyalty lie? With his country or with his wife?”
Making “Black Bag” was also a chance for each actor to reunite with Steven Soderbergh, who Fassbender worked with on 2011’s “Haywire” and Blanchett collaborated with on 2006’s “The Good German.” As an added bonus, Blanchett says that the script by David Koepp had a richness and texture that was irresistible.
“Reading it, I just understood these characters — they had such distinct personalities — and the world was so easy to visualize,” she says. “And it’s a mid-budget film that is made for adults, which there’s hardly any of them out there. And very few filmmakers are better at doing those kind of smart, sophisticated stories than Steven.”
Soderbergh doesn’t just direct his movies; he also edits them and acts as cinematographer. So, on set, he’s wielding the camera, in addition to calling the shots.
“You sort of dance with him,” Fassbender says, swaying side to side. “He’s got this wonderful energy and he just permeates confidence throughout the set, because he is so competent. Not only is he operating the camera, he’s lighting the room, and then, of course, he’s going to edit everything later in the day. You feel like you’re in good hands.”
That was particularly important when it came to staging and shooting the film’s two most difficult sequences, both of which are set around a dining room table. In one, George invites all the suspects to a dinner party, where he puts a dollop of truth serum into the food and sits back to try to see who might reveal something. In the second, he reconvenes them to reveal who the mole actually is, a dramatic finale that takes some unexpected twists. Soderbergh had the actors run through the scenes once, purely so he could work out his camera movements and then chopped up the scene into smaller moments so he could keep the tension high.
“I found it discombobulating,” Blanchett admits. “We were sitting there a long time in between takes, talking about everything but the scene, so it would stay fresh. And then we’d do all these different pieces. On the second day, I lost track of things. It was like, ‘What are we doing again?’”
Regé-Jean Page, who co-stars as one of Blanchett and Fassbender’s fellow spies and dinner party guests, says working with the other members of the A-list ensemble on such high-wire scenes kept him on his toes.
“If felt like we were stepping on stage and going out there to play this incredible verbal tennis match,” Page explains. “And Steven was very clear that his primary interest was in people’s reactions, in how they were being affected and manipulated by what was being said. That meant staying acutely aware of how the threat level is changing around that table.”
Soderbergh was also clear about what he wanted the tone of “Black Bag” to be throughout its relatively lean 93-minute running time. This wasn’t something gritty and grimy and “real.” He was looking for sizzle.
“Spies’ lives can be isolating and lonely, and movies about them can be quite dour,” Fassbender says. “And Steven was like, ‘No, not this one. It’s got to be sexy. It’s got to have style.’”
Beyond a get-to-know-you meal shortly before filming, Fassbender and Blanchett didn’t talk much about how they were approaching their parts or what their characters’ relationship was like before production began.
“I don’t much like having discussions,” Fassbender admits. “It doesn’t help me much. I want to see Cate’s interpretation when I get to set and what she’s throwing out there. It means I have to be listening and awake and trying to respond. I find doing that more exciting than talking about it.”
Neither actor consulted real-life spies, because the secrecy of their work means that they aren’t open to sharing office gossip with film stars. However, Blanchett did read memoirs of former agents.
“I discovered that for female spies there is still a kind of thoughtless misogyny within most of these agencies,” Blanchett says. “It’s infuriating because female operatives can actually garner a lot of subtle information that male operatives aren’t as attuned to getting. People open up to them more because they don’t expect women to be in the field.”
When it comes to her own profession, Blanchett has often been outspoken about how male-dominated and exclusionary it can be, while pushing for Hollywood to embrace more diversity both in front of and behind the camera. In 2023, for instance, she helped launch an accelerator program supporting women, trans and nonbinary filmmakers called Proof of Concept. It was part of a wave of initiatives that took place after the #MeToo movement and then the murder of George Floyd left studios and streamers pledging to shake up their hiring practices and workplace cultures. Since Donald Trump has been re-elected, however, vowing to end DEI programs, entertainment companies have been backing away from those promises or abandoning them entirely.
“I’m concerned about what it means for our wider, everyday lives because we’re a very public-facing industry,” Blanchett says. “It sends a bad signal.”
But she also believes that studios will realize they’re making a mistake if they go back to the old way of making movies and shows.
“If the landscapes and the sets and the writers’ rooms that we’re working on are homogenous, then the output will be dull, because homogeneity is the enemy of complex, exciting, dynamic art of any form,” Blanchett says. “Nobody wants that.”