Spies? They’re a lot like actors, says Cate Blanchett

Truth and identity are at the heart of any performance, but in Cate Blanchett’s latest film, they are the most slippery of constructs. Black Bag stars Blanchett as a poised, self-possessed and inscrutable spy who is suspected of betraying her nation. The parallels with her own craft are clear.

“As an actor, you’re constantly stepping in and out of different realities,” she says. “So you stave off that sense of being constrained by one reality. Or you see how complex reality is. And you learn to live with doubt and ambiguity.”

What interests her about spies, she says, is why and how people fall into the spying game in the first place. “Often, traditionally, I think people have gone into espionage because they couldn’t fully live their lives in a conventional sense, either sexually or culturally. So they could step in and out of that, which made the strain of dealing with societal norms much easier to deal with,” she says.

Blanchett plays Kathryn Woodhouse, one half of a spying couple; Michael Fassbender is her stony-faced husband, George. Official destinations are secret. “Black bag!” one will say crisply when the other asks where they’re going today. They have to trust not only that this is true, but that their partner is playing a straight bat. Because somebody in their organisation isn’t, as it turns out. George is charged with finding out who is siphoning off secrets worth millions into a personal account. There are five suspects, but chief among them is his wife.

Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in Black Bag.Credit: Claudette Barius/Focus Features

George’s first move is to invite all the potential traitors to dinner under the guise of a workplace get-together in their home, which looks like a luxury hotel. The dinner, an arduously formal event, soon turns into a mesh of mind games. “It’s Edward Albee meets John Le Carre via [director] Steven Soderbergh,” Blanchett enthuses.

The film’s fiendishly complicated script is the work of David Koepp, who collaborated with Soderbergh on his 2024 horror film, Presence, but has also written blockbusters such as Jurassic Park and the 1996 Mission: Impossible.

“Obviously with David’s work on Mission Impossible, he has interviewed countless intelligence operatives about their life and work,” says Blanchett. “Something that continually came up for him was that it is almost impossible to sustain a relationship. When you can lie about everything, how do you tell the truth about anything? So, in order to have an ongoing relationship, there has to be a profound sense of trust. As you see with George and Kathryn, they have to know the bottom line.

“I found that question – what is trust in this world? – really interesting. But, of course, you don’t have to be in the world of espionage to understand the fear of being betrayed by your nearest and dearest. And to trust, you have to make yourself profoundly vulnerable – which is not something you associate with moving through the modern world.”

Opening up to the possibility of betrayal, she says, is hard enough for anybody, while the pain that follows is immediately recognisable. Anyone can relate to that.

Blanchett first worked with Soderbergh on The Good German (2006), a box-office flop, but one that cemented her friendship with co-star George Clooney. She also appeared in Ocean’s 8, the all-female spin-off from Soderbergh’s hugely successful Ocean’s series of heist movies. “We’re in one another’s orbit quite a lot.”

As a director, she says, he is impressively efficient. “Presence, the film he made in, I think, nine days – something ridiculous – is extraordinary. But he’s always trying something new, whether it’s a release strategy or a particular lens or a way of shooting, always setting himself a challenge, which creates a particular frisson on his sets.”

From left: Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris and Michael Fassbender share an uneasy dinner in Black Bag.Credit: Claudette Barius/Focus Features

The cast has been assembled with all the playfulness of a Cluedo game. Sitting around the table with Kathryn and George is Naomie Harris (the Bond franchise’s current Miss Moneypenny), Bridgerton heart-throb Regé-Jean Page, Back to Black star Marisa Abela and Tom Burke, an actor who has almost cornered the market in duplicitous posh boys. The team is under the command of none other than Pierce Brosnan, who played Bond from 1995 to 2002, now playing an old-school Oxbridge spy chief.

Blanchett didn’t feel the need to discuss her character with any of them, however.

“Oftentimes you unpack things with the other actors and you talk about their relationships, but we’re talking about people who are profoundly hidden, not only from other people but often from themselves,” she says. “So sometimes it’s really good for other actors not to know what you’re thinking.

“We only read through the dinner scene once, then [Soderbergh] broke it into pieces – and that kept everyone on their toes because we knew the scene only as it was unfolding. So with him, I talked mostly about what he wanted, how he was going to shoot it and what it was going to look like.”

What it looks like, she believes, is very masculine. “When I stepped into [production designer] Phil Messina’s set, it was deeply male ... so I went, ‘OK, Kathryn is not a homemaker.’”

George and Kathryn have no children, certainly. “I always thought they had poured all of their passion, their love, their commitment – and their dysfunction, let’s face it – into their singular connection to each other,” says Blanchett. “And I think it makes them very dangerous individuals because you know they’re sitting on a lot of problematic backstory which you kind of keep waiting to see explode.”

Women “can navigate uncharted territory of the spy-agent relationship in ways that I think men can’t”, says Blanchett of her character in Black Bag.Credit: Claudette Barius/Focus Features

Soderbergh views Kathryn, moreover, with what she calls “an unapologetic male gaze”.

“Because it’s through the idea of suspicion, which in a marital situation is usually suspicion of infidelity, but in this situation is metaphysical infidelity. Look at the way Kathryn’s introduced. She’s undressed, getting dressed, her husband looking at her. My character is an object, really, at the beginning of the film. She then becomes a subject and an agent. It’s quite an interesting journey.”

That creep into agency also dramatises what is especially interesting in women as spies, whether in real life or fiction.

“I’m fascinated by female spies,” says Blanchett. “I think there’s a whole series of things women can achieve in espionage because they are underestimated and they can achieve things that their male operatives can’t.”

Think of Ana de Armas in No Time to Die: nobody, especially 007, has any inkling of the carnage this little firebrand can cause in a Cuban bar. Her strength comes from nowhere.

Blanchett’s character keeps everyone - including her husband - guessing in Black Bag.Credit: Claudette Barius/Focus Features

“Women are the liminal ones; they sort of drop away because there’s not the same level of expectation,” Blanchett says. “So they can navigate uncharted territory of the spy-agent relationship in ways that I think men can’t.”

Taken further, women spies are often seen as the more dangerous – in films, but also in life – because they are so mysteriously female.

“If you think about the noir genre, absolutely,” Blanchett agrees. “But if you think about someone like Mata Hari, it’s always through the lens of her sexuality.”

Mata Hari was an exotic dancer and courtesan, famous for appearing wearing only a few well-placed jewels, who was accused of spying for the Germans during World War I; her story has been retold in numerous films and musicals.

“There was a freedom to that,” says Blanchett. “Probably also a lot of damage, but there is a liberation, intellectually, sexually and morally, that’s certainly always leaned into, in films about the female spy. And this film plays with that.”

Has she ever met a spy? Blanchett starts to laugh. “No self-respecting spy tells you absolutely that that’s what they do! But it’s something you wonder with people who disappear for long periods of time.”

She recommends the Javier Marias novel Berta Isla, which describes the life of a spy’s wife, trying to assemble an image of the man who spends half of his life somewhere else. “She is the person on the other side, trying to piece together the truth of who that person is,” she says. “The thing is, we always think we’ve got one static identity. But spy stories are compelling because they celebrate that fact that we are many things – and different things in different situations. They just take that to extremes.”

Black Bag is in cinemas from March 13.