In 2015, a spy series like no other debuted on French television. Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau), which revolved around the lives of agents in France's principal external security service, took heavy inspiration from the real accounts of former spies, weaving in their experiences with contemporary events. The result was one of the best TV shows to hit France’s airwaves, and the basis for one of the year’s most surprising new shows: The Agency.
Like its French predecessor, The Agency, which follows the exploits of deep undercover CIA agents, is remarkably grounded for a spy series. The series stars Michael Fassbender as “Martian,” a CIA agent suddenly yanked out of his six-year undercover assignment. Back at home base in London, Martian must navigate the mistrust of his higher-ups, played by Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere, as well as the probing attention of his former handler (Katherine Waterston), while restarting an ill-advised affair with a woman (Jodie Turner-Smith) he fell in love with during his assignment. The premise is very similar to The Bureau, but the execution is not.
“Obviously, it's a whole different group [of actors]. That's the special sauce,” Turner-Smith tells Inverse. “There are definitely some more action-y elements to this one, which I think is better suited for an American audience. It’s our spin on this and we're changing, we're updating. These are different geopolitical issues that we're talking about that are so current and relevant in this moment.”
CIA “Middle Management”
Created by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, the writing duo behind films like Ford v. Ferrari and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Agency might feature a few more explosions than the French series, but it doesn’t give into the temptation to “Americanize” its story too much. It’s still a series that takes its subject matter and characters seriously.
“That's one thing that really impressed me,” Katherine Waterston tells Inverse. “It was striking a fairer balance than things I'd seen in the past that would either lean towards the cynical or the glamorous.”
Waterston spoke to several former and current CIA operatives to prepare for her role as Naomi, Martian’s former handler. “From all my research, there are moments of excitement and intensity, and there's navigating power dynamics at work, trying to get approval on a project, research, analysis, plotting and planning, and all of that together. It just felt like we were getting at something, or crucially, the Butterworths had gotten at something exciting because it was so realistic.”
That’s one of the more striking things about The Agency — beneath the paranoid atmosphere and the threat of international crisis, it’s almost a workplace drama. The series is about undercover agents, but also about the handlers and bureaucrats behind the desks who keep the CIA running. It’s a unique perspective to the spy thriller that Waterston thinks the writers nailed.
“I just love the balance that the Butterworths struck,” Waterston tells Inverse. “So often, particularly for women in storytelling, you'll either be the hard-nosed boss, or you'll be the subservient staffer. And this gets at a more honest thing.”
The Agency and the Real World
Jeffrey Wright, who plays Henry, the CIA’s director of operations and Naomi’s boss, has a personal insight into this underseen aspect of civil service; he grew up in Washington, D.C., with a mom who worked as a lawyer for US Customs. “I had an awareness of, not the culture of the CIA, but the culture of civil servants, government employees. I have a great deal of respect for them, what they do, why they do what they do,” Wright tells Inverse.
“A lot of people go into that work because they have an interest in it, they're smart, they're highly trained in what they do, and they want a good solid job,” Wright adds. “There's a lot of disparagement in the air, particularly from the politicians. I wouldn't trust a politician as far as I could throw them, relative to someone who does this type of work. They have to be serious people. And that, for me, was kind of a window into Henry.”
Wright’s Henry is a fascinating character, a beleaguered boss forced to deal with internal politics, but ruthless when it comes to international crises. There’s a tough sequence in the second episode that touches on torture; the scene is grimly supervised by Henry, who had been the most sympathetic to our protagonist, Martian.
“Yeah, it's a complicated agency. It's, at times, a morally dubious agency,” Wright says of the dichotomy. “It's an agency, maybe, that causes more problems than it solves at times. But he's a guy who's serious about his work and who's doing the best he can. He's working inside a machine, inside a bureaucracy, but he's also human, but he also has to sacrifice maybe some of that humanity to accomplish some of the work. That's complicated.”
That may be the best way to describe The Agency: complicated. In attempting to put a more grounded spin on a genre frequently used for escapist fare, The Agency wades into the troubling, ethically dubious reality of the CIA. And while it may not have all the right answers, it’s undeniably doing something fresh and new with the spy series.
