The AgencyReview: Michael Fassbender Stars as an Unsmiling Spy with Bedroom Eyes

Mar. 15, 2025

Fassbender plays a CIA agent who bends the rules to the breaking point in ‘The Agency’.Photo:Luke Varley/Paramount+ with Showtime

Luke Varley/Paramount+ with Showtime

Good luck! Fassbender is colder, more closed in and at times scarcely more human than the android he played with such sly lethal humor inAlien: Covenant.His career, he explains to Dr. Blake, encourages insanity — perhaps requires it, given the job’s danger level and endless swapping of identities: “The person sitting in front of you is, was and will remain purely, deeply, 100 percent verifiably nuts.”

In other words he isn’tTom Cruisein theMission: Impossiblefranchise, pulling latex masks off his face to reveal himself with a gloating twinkle. Then again, maybe he’s playing his own secret game, trying to out-suss the therapist. His mask may be too subtle for us to detect — at least, not initially.Still, even if his insanity plea is a ruse or even a supremely deadpan joke, this CIA isn’t going to make its way onto anyone’s list of best companies to work for. All the spies inThe Agency —including Martian’s superior(American Fiction’sJeffrey Wright) andhissuperior(Oh, Canada’sRichard Gere) —all seem to harbor in their bowels long, slowly writhing tapeworms of bureaucratic anxiety.They have plenty to worry about. As the show begins, an agent posted in Minsk has gotten drunk, crashed his car and been taken into custody at the police station-from which he’s vanished without explanation. Other international crises soon come calling like loud, unwanted relatives barging in on a holiday meal.

Michael Fassbender with costars Richard Gere, left, and Jeffrey Wright, center.Luke Varley/Paramount+ with Showtime

But Martian isn’t making anyone’s job easier. Out on assignment he fell in love with a gorgeous professor, Sami Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith). Now she’s in London, too, with an academic post that possibly camouflages an espionage agenda of her own. She and Martian resume their affair. This is playing with fire while conditioning your hair with gasoline.

That doesn’t keep this from being one of the most promising new shows out there. You get the urgency of world events, secret bedroom adventures and-oh!-that Fassbender, with his firm mouth, noble profile and burning gaze.

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New episodes launch Fridays on Paramount + With Showtime.

source: people.com