When a Twisty and Witty Spy Thriller Is Also a Smart and Sexy Relationship Drama: Michael Fassbender and Marisa Abela Talk 'Black Bag'

Pick a genre, any genre, and the following statement will always prove true: no one does it like Steven Soderbergh. Now 36 years on from his Cannes Palme d'Or-winning narrative feature debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape, he's long been one of Hollywood's most-reliable filmmakers. The word 'reliable' can't capture the spark of a Soderbergh project, though — whether the ever-prolific director, cinematographer, editor and screenwriter is in heist mode in Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen and Logan Lucky; predicting the COVID-19 pandemic via Contagion and then diving into its daily reality (and technology's hellscape) in Kimi; spinning a franchise out of Channing Tatum's IRL origin story with Magic Mike and Magic Mike's Last Dance; reimagining medical TV shows in stunning fashion courtesy of The Knick; or telling a haunted-house story from the ghost's perspective in Presence.

Spies battling spies: as familiar as that setup is on screens big and small, no one does that as Soderbergh has with Black Bag, either. With his second cinema release of 2025 after Presence, and his third film out of his past four that's penned by fellow veteran David Koepp (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) — kicking off with Kimi, and again including Presence — he's in Mr and Mrs Smith and True Lies territory, but this take is a particular gem. Black Bag is a twisty and witty espionage thriller filled with secrets, interrogations, surveillance, polygraphs, redirected satellites and not knowing who is on the level. It's as much a smart and sexy relationship drama as well, however. How can any romance work, even a long-established marriage, when either party can explain away anything as part of their clandestine jobs — and when deceit is what each does for a living? Aptly, the picture's title references spy code for confidential missions and details that can't be shared. An especially great line of dialogue also sums up the scenario: "when you can lie about everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?".

In Black Bag's opening scene, courtesy of a sublime tracking shot lensed by Soderbergh himself — who directs, shoots and edits the film, as he regularly does on his flicks — George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender, Kneecap) winds from London's streets to an underground club to receive a new task. A well-experienced and highly regarded operative at the National Cyber Security Centre within Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, he now needs to ascertain who has betrayed the country by stealing a cyberworm called Severus, which can destabilise nuclear facilities. There's five names on his list, all his colleagues: Kathryn St Jean (Cate Blanchett, Disclaimer), Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela, Back to Black), Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves) and Dr Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris, The Man Who Fell to Earth). Among the six NCSC employees, George included, there's three couples; Kathryn is his wife.

The quest to ascertain who's behind the betrayal starts with a dinner party at George and Kathryn's home — one that's really an interrogation, aided by not just food and wine but truth serum. Clarissa is the youngest of the bunch and the newest to the job, with her relationship with the older, fond-of-a-drink Freddie already chaotic. Zoe is everyone's psychiatrist at NCSC, and the fact that James is both her patient and her lover is patently complicated. George and Kathryn seem to enjoy the ideal marriage, one revered by their co-workers and friends, yet he's suspicious of movie ticket stubs and sudden trips. Loyalties aren't just tested over the course of Black Bag's snappy 93-minute running time; so is love's resilience. For George, choosing between his wife and his nation threatens to become a real possibility.

David Dettmann/StillMoving.Net for Universal Pictures

Soderbergh and Fassbender first collaborated on 2011's Haywire, another sinuous (and ace) thriller with intelligence ties. Take that, mix it with Out of Sight's slinkiness and the filmmaker's long-established love of a caper, then throw in a bit of The Agency — Fassbender's recent and also-excellent TV series set in the spy realm, where personal and professional crises equally overlap — and that's Black Bag's wheelhouse. This is a fun film, too, and often very funny, as its guiding force perfects its balancing act with style, skill and supreme precision. (Part of the picture's sense of humour: casting former Bond Pierce Brosnan among its agents.) It puts Fassbender into another high-stakes workplace situation as well, as is clearly the case with The Agency. While Industry, aka one of the best shows the 2020s, plunges into the world of finance, it too dwells in cut-throat employment circumstances, so Abela is in somewhat familiar terrain herself. Again, of course, whenever Soderbergh is making a film or TV show, similarities elsewhere are superficial.

Any parallels across the 12 Years a Slave and Steve Jobs Oscar-nominee's resume of late — after the Hunger, Fish Tank, Inglourious Basterds, Shame, Macbeth, two-time Alien saga and four-time X-Men franchise star's absence from acting from 2020–2022, as broken by 2023's The Killer — is "just the way it sort of fell", Fassbender tells Concrete Playground. For Abela, adding Black Bag to a filmography that also includes Cobra, Rogue Agent and Barbie began with being hooked by and "whizzing through" Koepp's entertaining screenplay, she advises. Fassbender jumping back in front of the camera for Soderbergh, the "I need to be in this" moment for Abela, the importance of this being a relationship drama as much as a spy flick, interrogation scenes, back-and-forth banter for a director supremely skilled at bringing it to the screen: we also chatted with Fassbender and Abela about it all.

On Whether There's Something That Draws Fassbender and Soderbergh Together for Twisty Thrillers with Espionage Ties

Michael: "No, it just happened that way. It was such a joy for me to get to work with him, especially so early on for me. And just to see that knowledge of film, and how to have an all-encompassing understanding of what a film is, how to make it, what makes a good film, the architecture of it all — that was clear from the first time when I was working with him.

How he enters a room and scans the room, it's almost birdlike. His precision and the confidence. And now internally, he might have that, but it definitely permeates on set. You can see that all the other crew members love working with him as well — that's not exclusive to actors.

David Dettmann/StillMoving.Net for Universal Pictures

It's a very relaxed atmosphere, and he just lets you do whatever you're going to do. And it's quite intimidating at first — you're thinking 'I hope he, is he happy with this? We're moving on after two takes. Does he think that he's just not going to get anything better?'.

But that's how he likes to go, I think — to find that first freshness of whatever was given, and what was captured in that fresh one or two or three takes.

I'm so happy that we got together to work on it on something like this, with an ensemble cast. It's kind of like a play in certain respects — certainly the dinner table scenes."

On How Abela Knew That She Wanted to Add Playing the Strong, Determined But Also Sensitive Clarissa to Her Resume

Marisa: "I think that it was honestly with the script at the very beginning. It's quite rare, I think, to get a script where you're just whizzing through it and it's kind of reading itself — and you just feel by the end of it how much fun it would be to be a part of a project like that.

And when I realised who else was involved — and obviously I knew that Steven was directing, but when I heard about Michael and Cate and everyone attached — I was just so excited to be a part of it.

David Dettmann/StillMoving.Net for Universal Pictures

And I think that Clarissa really spoke to me on the first read of the script. As you say, I think that she's incredibly, she cuts through anything that's going on because she's able to speak honestly from a place of strength — but also, I think from a place of innocence and wanting to find out what is at the heart of this world for all of these people.

I think she's still figuring out, at the beginning of this movie, whether this is a world that she wants to be a part of or not — whereas I think everyone else is quite entrenched into it. So I think that that discovery is an interesting place to come to from her."

On How Important It Was That Black Bag Is a Relationship Drama as Much as a Spy Film

Michael: "It's all about the relationships. That's why it always makes me think of a play as well. You're watching these relationships play out, and each of them are connected to one another, whether they want to be or not.

He says early on 'this isn't necessarily the dinner party that you would choose'. These people aren't necessarily going to go out and socialise with one another, but they've been brought together — and then through the course of the movie, you start to figure out how they're all entangled in one another and how messy it is.

And it's so right what Marisa is saying about the character of Clarissa, is that she's looking at it as the new person coming in, the youngest person in the room, going 'this is bullshit — can't you all see it?'. And they're looking at her going 'give it time, you'll see'.

And it's all those dynamics going on, which make it interesting. But for sure it happens to be set, which also makes it interesting, in the espionage world. But it's just about relationships."

On Black Bag's Commonalities with Fassbender and Abela's Other Recent Roles

Michael: "That just happened to me on the same week, Black Bag and The Agency came, actually. And it wasn't — that's just the way it sort of fell, and there were two interesting projects that I wanted to do.

I didn't sit down and go 'okay, I'm going into spy territory now for the next few years'. It just happened that way, as it often does. And it's just about finding material that stimulates — and you feel like 'okay, this is for an adult audience that would enjoy sitting down, going on this journey'."

Marisa: "I guess it's the same with Industry in a sense, in that it is kind of in a workplace environment,, but you probably couldn't get two more different places of work. Especially for my character, for Yasmin in Industry. I think she would make the world's worst spy, probably.

It's quite interesting to play two young women in probably what are quite male-dominated environments. I've never had an office job, but neither of them are particularly regular jobs anyway, so maybe I'm just enticed into that world in some way."

On the Keys to Making an Interrogation Scene Sing

Michael: "I think the setup. A certain form of repetition. Humour. And then, of course, somebody in the room is lying and everybody knows that, so the tension builds from that."

Marisa: "Steven is so brilliant at building the tension in those moments. And what's nice is that then that gives you the freedom, as the actors, to just play your reality of the scene.

Obviously every character is playing to win in that moment, which is playing to tell the truth or to find out the truth — or to cover up a lie. But they should all hopefully be as good at looking like they're telling the truth as one another, no matter who is telling the lie, because it's what they do for a living. So you have this built-in tension into it, but we're just focused on playing to win.

And then it's up to Steven to linger on whoever for however long and make the audience think whatever it is that they think in those moments."

Michael: "And the foreplay to the actual interrogation itself. The rigging up of the equipment, increasing pressure on the blood-pressure armband. The fact that sweat is being read. The pulse in the fingers. The machine is scribbling constantly. And the camera's set on a particular face, where the camera goes for reaction — then it's the camera placement and what Steven does."

On Bringing Back-and-Forth Banter to Life for a Director Who Has Made It a Hallmark of His Films

Marisa: "I think he's really great at casting. That is a massive part of it. I think that he knows each of these individual six characters are so different and so distinctive, but there's a real chemistry when we're all together — and having a scene like that, or two scenes like that in our movie, where everyone actually does get the opportunity to play together, I think the chemistry just speaks for itself in that moment.

We're really lucky that that happened. And then I think in terms of, like I said, you're just really playing those moments.

I think something that, in that first scene, lends a hand for all of us is that we've taken this truth serum. So there's a freedom in that conversation. Especially with, that was my first scene with Clarissa, where she's able to be quite brazen with George specifically at that table. I think there's a freedom in knowing that she's taken this serum and she's intoxicated and she's not quite adhering to social norms and boundaries, as she should do. So there's a freedom that comes with that."

Black Bag released in cinemas Down Under on Thursday, March 13, 2025.

Film stills: Claudette Barius/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.