Richard Gere, Michael Fassbender talk playing spies in exclusive first look at ‘The Agency’

Richard Gere has a big problem with his new series,The Agency.

The veteran movie star heads to the small screen with only the second TV role of his entire career for the Paramount+/Showtime espionage political thriller based on the hit French series Le Bureau des Légendes. Gere tells Entertainment Weekly that he and his wife “were hooked on” the original, but now he can’t watch the new version.

“The one thing that I feel terrible about is I probably can’t watch this, because I hate watching myself,” Gere, 75, says. “I thought about that a couple of weeks ago: ‘I probably won’t be watching this with my wife.’ She’ll watch it on her own — she will, I know her.”

The Agency (premiering late fall on Paramount+ with Showtime) follows a covert CIA agent (Michael Fassbender), code name Martian, who is ordered to abandon his undercover life and return to London Station. But when the love he left behind reappears, romance reignites, and his career, his real identity, and his mission are pitted against his heart. 

Fassbender originally started his career in TV with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg‘s Band of Brothers in 2001 before turning to film, so The Agency represents a return of sorts — albeit in a new, exciting way. “I’ve never done a TV series as the lead, so I’ve got a lot of respect for it,” he tells EW. “It’s a jam-packed schedule, you’ve got to move fast, you’ve got to get things done, but I’m really, really enjoying it.”

Like Gere, Fassbender also loved the original French series when he watched it about five years ago. “This doesn’t really happen to me a lot, but I actually thought while I was watching, ‘I wonder what I could do in that role?”’ Fassbender says. “And then five years later, [the producers] approached me about the idea of doing this. I read the scripts, and it was just an easy decision to make.”

Gere, who plays Bosko, the London Station Chief with a storied past after serving as an undercover agent himself, has spent more than 40 years playing iconic roles in movies, including American Gigolo, Pretty Woman, An Officer and a Gentleman, Runaway Bride, Chicago, Primal Fear, and many, many more. He finally moved to the small screen for his first major TV role in 2019’s British crime thriller MotherFatherSon, but he wasn’t exactly planning to continue taking TV roles … until he read the scripts for The Agency. His love for the original French spy drama paired with the gripping writing of Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth (Ford v Ferrari, Edge of Tomorrow) essentially made the decision for him. But he was shocked to see how much TV has evolved throughout his film career.

“What we’re seeing these days, there are beautiful things that are done on TV,” Gere says. “I mean, when I was a kid, you didn’t want to do TV — it was just something you didn’t do. It just wasn’t of the highest quality, but now we’re seeing things on TV that are as good or better than almost everything we’re seeing on [movie] screens.”

He pauses before adding, “It’s hard to even call it television now. It’s a different animal. I’ve got to tell you, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I was amazed at how much money is involved in this. When I came to the sets outside of London, I hadn’t worked on a set like this in probably 25 or 30 years, maybe more, of sound stages being taken over with huge sets. Very sizable budgets to tell stories.”

That’s why, on the first day Gere arrived on set for The Agency, he felt nervous — which he reveals “always” happens on the first day of a new project, even after all these years (stars, they’re just like us!). “Even the ones that I know exactly what I’m doing, there’s always that added energy to the first day of shooting,” he says. “I mean, I probably wouldn’t do it if it didn’t have that kind of energy to it, if it didn’t scare me a little bit.”

Gere hadn’t worked with or even met his costars Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright before filming began, which added to those first-day jitters. “That was new,” he says. “I came in very quickly from something else that I was doing, and I was the new guy in school. The first few days were a little rough, but they’re terrific actors and terrific guys.”

“It’s a real privilege to go to work with Richard Gere and Jeffrey Wright,” Fassbender says.

In those first few days of production, Fassbender found himself getting sucked into the “fascinating world” of long-term undercover espionage “and the kind of personalities who are drawn to that kind of existence, because you can never be your true self.” The idea of sacrificing your personal life and identity to maintain a profession that bleeds into every aspect of your identity is something that he, surprisingly, found relatable. “I’m an actor, so we lie for a living,” Fassbender says with a laugh.

But that’s where the similarities to his character end. “This character in some ways is trying to save his soul through two relationships: His lover, who he gets extricated away from when he’s called back when his mission ends, and his daughter, who he hasn’t seen properly for six years,” Fassbender says. “Because to do that kind of job, to have sociopathic tendencies is helpful to be able to get a good night’s sleep, to be able to function the next day, to be able to compartmentalize.”

When the series begins, Fassbender’s character has been in deep cover on a mission for six years when he’s called back into the office. “It’s been an extremely long time, and there can be some effects trying to come back in and be institutionalized again within a system where he’s kind of been his own boss and out on his own,” Fassbender says. “Again, there are sociopathic elements there where the same rules don’t apply to him because he knows better and he is effective and gets the job done.”

But he now has to answer to his actual boss, and the two actors loved bringing Bosko and Martian’s complex dynamic to life throughout the season. “This is a big shot,” Gere says of his character. “He’s got a mouth on him, too — he’s not the strong silent type, this guy. He’s the chief station officer in London for the CIA, and it’s probably the most important office outside of Langley in the world. He’s someone who came from the field, so he knows the territory, he knows what his agents are going through.”

After talking about the character with director Joe Wright over Zoom, Gere had the freedom to bring him to life in whatever way he wanted. “I think another actor might’ve taken this in a different direction,” he admits. “I wanted to be someone who is believable that they’ve been out in the field, that they’ve been in danger, that they’ve had to improvise, that there’ve been threats on his life, and that he may have killed somebody — certainly have been party to events and dramas that people have died. That was important for me, that he feel that that character has a weight to him from experience.”

But at the same time, he had to balance Bosko’s role as the boss. “He has to be responsible, and he has to lead his people, and he has to make difficult decisions,” Gere says. “Part of that is tough love. These agents have to know what they’re doing or they’ll get hurt.”

Playing “somewhat of a father figure” to the agents in the office was something that Gere had never done before in his career. “They’re not kids, but I am the boss and I have the ultimate say what goes on,” he says. “There’s a team he’s constantly juggling, and some of them are up to it and some are not, and they’ve got to be called. There’s a level of tipping point where there’s no patience anymore.”

Gere teases that there will be moments where Bosko cracks, especially as he tries to lead Fassbender and Wright’s spy duo. “They have a very close relationship, the two of them,” he says. “There are some things I don’t tell them, and I know there are things they don’t tell me. I don’t really penetrate that with these two because I know they need it, but there is a tipping point where I would have to say stop.”

While the actors don’t want to spoil where the season goes, they both promise that viewers will be on the edge of their seats. “There’s a lot of nail-biting moments, that’s for sure,” Fassbender says. “The tension builds and builds and when they reach the climax, it all builds beautifully.”

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Gere teases that “every episode is going to have surprises,” and that “it’s going to be its own creature” from the original French series.

“It’ll hopefully have the same excellent qualities of that one, but also that was probably 10 years ago, and it ran for five years,” he adds. “And the world was a different place 10 years ago, and the focus of the world conflicts that it was engaging in is different than the ones today. This is very contemporary. It’s very today, the political world that this [series] deals with.”

As for whether Gere hopes The Agency will run for the same amount of seasons as the original? “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know how long I would last,” he admits with a laugh. “I get bored easily. It’s fun at this point. Give me a year.”