The cast and crew of BLACK BAG premiered the movie in London on Tuesday, 11 March. Cate Blanchett, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Fassbender, Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke and Marisa Abela are all present at the premiere at Curzon Mayfair Cinema.

The movie has been well-received by both critics and audience, it has 85% rating on Metacritic, 97% on Rotten Tomatoes with 160+ reviews from critics and 71% audience rating.

On some of the interviews, Cate Blanchett and Naomie Harris mentioned that they were supposed to be working together on another film with Soderbergh but didn’t happen, Cate said in one interview that other film is complicated to make.

You can find interviews with the cast and Soderbergh, and a behind the scene look at the film below. Beware of spoilers!

BLACK BAG is now in cinemas! Get your tickets here.

It’s taken a few false starts to get Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender on the same Zoom call. She’s been preparing to open a production of “The Seagull” at the Barbican in London, her first time onstage since 2019. He’s been on a much-needed holiday with his family before returning home to Lisbon. Perhaps that’s why, in an hour that finally aligns with everyone’s schedule, it feels genuinely miraculous to hear the two actors share stories of their craft.

There’s a lighthearted moment of catching up between them, reuniting after shooting Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller “Black Bag” last spring. Fassbender wants to know how she feels about the play’s opening night (a bit nervous), and Blanchett is curious if he wrapped his series “The Agency” (yes, in December). They have an easy shorthand that suggests a long history. But in truth, they only shared a handful of encounters before making “Black Bag.”

They recall meeting at various awards shows in 2014, when Fassbender was Oscar-nominated as a supporting actor in Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” and Blanchett won the lead actress award for Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine.” A few years later, they were on set in Austin, Texas, for Terrence Malick’s elliptical 2017 drama “Song to Song.”

“We actually did a scene together in that,” Fassbender remembers.

“If you can call it that,” Blanchett cracks. She’s sparky but focused as she sits in her home office. “I don’t think it made the film. I don’t think anything I did in that movie ever made the film. It was in that phase where Terry, having come off the back of making one film a decade, made three or four in a row.”

“He literally did ‘Knight of Cups’ and then straight into ‘Song to Song,’” Fassbender recalls, speaking from what appears to be a very ornate living room with tall ceilings, before asking Blanchett, “Did you do ‘Knight of Cups’ as well?”

“I did,” she affirms. “But likewise I don’t know whether anything I did was in the movie. But that’s the contract, isn’t it?”

Not so with their current director, Soderbergh, whose efficiency and command are legendary. “You know that when you work with him, absolutely everything you shoot will be in it,” Blanchett says, with a sense of pride. She grins, adding, “And, in fact, he’s already shot and edited the thing before any of us have shown up.”

In “Black Bag,” Blanchett and Fassbender play a married couple who are both high-level spies in the British government. Soderbergh and Blanchett had been planning to collaborate on a different film, but when that didn’t come to fruition, the director pivoted to screenwriter David Koepp’s wry, unconventional take on an espionage story.

“It’s hard to find things that are commercial that are also really good,” Soderbergh told me in London earlier this year. “And it had certain challenges in it that were of concern, and I wanted to see if I could pull that off.”

There’s a memorable intensity to the filmmaker that can sometimes feel remote. Blanchett admits that, initially, she was “absolutely terrified” of him.

“He was an enigma,” Blanchett says of making 2006’s “The Good German.” “He was totally present, but I had no idea how to communicate with him. After that experience, we got to know one another.”

She compares him to a peregrine falcon because “his frame rate operates at an entirely different speed to everybody else’s.”

“He is like a sharp-sighted bird,” Fassbender agrees. “When he walks into a room, he clocks everything.”

“You can’t replicate him,” Blanchett says. “I’ve worked with directors who have tried to imitate that relaxed quality that Steven has on set, but he is like a coiled spring. He’ll cut people off mid conversation and just start shooting. He’s always ready.”

“Black Bag” undercuts traditional spy films by swapping out action in favor of dialogue, notably in the form of two extended dinner party scenes. In the film, Fassbender’s character George Woodhouse is tasked with investigating a mole in the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre. He has five suspects, including his elusive, elegant wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett), one of the organization’s top agents. Both dinner parties are part of an attempt to elicit the truth.

“I wanted to see if I could get away with a 14-page dinner scene because that’s not supposed to work,” says Koepp, speaking over the phone later from New York. “You’re not supposed to have six people sitting at a table and have it build and erupt and hold your attention. I was trying not to do spy-movie tropes, so rather than a car chase before something explodes, I wanted the climax of the movie to be another dinner at the same table.”

Soderbergh was admittedly daunted but also enticed by the puzzle being presented. “If you ask any director, ‘What’s your least favorite kind of scene to shoot?’ I guarantee you ‘dinner table’ is going to be right at the top of the survey,” he says. “So I thought, ‘Can I come up with a way to execute this in which I’m invisible to the audience but the scene is still moving?’”

Usually, Blanchett says, Soderbergh likes to have long restaurant meals with his cast ahead of shooting. This time, she and Fassbender only joined him for one.

“I think because he knew he was going to be filming dinner scenes, it was making him anxious,” Blanchett deadpans. “His blood pressure was going up.”

“We should have gone out paintballing or something,” Fassbender suggests.

“Next time,” she agrees. “He always has to have an impossible challenge for himself as a filmmaker. He loves to not know how to do something. He doesn’t like it to be easy for himself, which is counterintuitive to the atmospheres that he creates on set, which is so relaxed.”

Typically, Soderbergh doesn’t invite his cast to rehearse. He puts his trust in the casting process and empowers the actors to get the job done. But these dinner table sequences were blocked ahead of time because of the technical challenges — which led Soderbergh to take out the middle of the dining table and get inside the hole with the camera.

“We did rehearse those, but it was for him, really,” Fassbender explains, himself a veteran of the filmmaker’s process from 2011’s thriller “Haywire.” “What’s kind of terrifying about Steven, which I had forgotten, is you do one take and he’s like, OK, moving on.’ And you’re like, ‘Wait a minute!’ He gives a lot of trust to everybody.”

Unsurprisingly, the dinner table scenes are taut and dynamic. The camera moves between characters rapidly, resulting in a sense of excitement and unease, and the climatic revelation of the mole is genuinely thrilling. It’s no wonder the actors enjoyed the experience of making “Black Bag” so much, particularly coming off such demanding films as “Tár” and Fassbender’s “The Killer” for David Fincher.

“The thing with working on film is that you’re always full of regret,” Blanchett acknowledges. Fassbender nods his head: “The drive home,” he says.

Blanchett continues, “But with Steven, he always keeps the sets open, so if he goes home at the end of the night and looks at the edit and realizes he didn’t get a shot, or we need another line, or a character needs an extra beat, we can go back and do it. You don’t necessarily get that time up front, but he considers all of it as he’s moving through the thing, which is really fascinating.”

Although very little of Kathryn and George’s backstory is revealed in the film, they have an unbreakable bond and a clear attraction. They skillfully navigate between their relationship and their jobs — if there’s anything the other can’t know, it goes in a metaphorical “black bag.” That trust is shaken, though, when George begins to suspect Kathryn’s activities.

“Part of what people find interesting about spies, particularly spies in cinema, is their interiority,” Blanchett says. “That tightrope walk between a deep morality and operating in a totally amoral space. And in a marriage, there are secrets. You do protect your partner from things. There has to be, in order for a relationship to last.”

“They’re constantly operating from a paranoid perspective on things, which is what keeps them alive and keeps them in the job,” Fassbender adds. “Even in the department they work in, you have to keep an eye over your shoulder. A sociopath does pretty well in this environment, but you don’t want too many sociopaths in the same department.”

“Black Bag” is Fassbender’s second time playing a spy during the last year. On the series “The Agency,” from Paramount+ with Showtime, he portrays hardened CIA agent Martian, who is working in London after a long deep-cover assignment. Both projects were offered to him within days of each other, although the similarity was not intentional.

“I’m just doing spies now,” Fassbender jokes. Blanchett, his perfect audience, laughs. He quips, “I just love lying to everyone.” Still, the actor was able to find specifics to “Black Bag’s” George that differed from Martian. It helped that Soderbergh approached the genre with notable warmth.

“The depressiveness of that job, which you can see in a lot of spy movies, is not there on the screen,” Fassbender says. “It looks sexy. It’s slick. That’s a very smart thing he’s done for this particular story. Usually there’s loneliness and isolation when you see spies who have been through a career for 25 years.”

“There’s a lot of chutzpah in being a spy,” says Blanchett. “They’re very serious people, but they’re also so much fun. They can’t have boundaries because they don’t know when they’re going to have to cross them. There’s a fluidity to them, but that fluidity is just masking an enormous amount of damage.”

Soderbergh’s speedy filmmaking style allowed the actors to discover moments together on set, which they both enjoyed. Blanchett describes the director as “incredibly precise, but there’s a flow to him.”

“He’s totally able to pivot,” she says. “Sometimes you can overthink things. I used to think, coming from the theater, that if you have all the time in the world, you’ll get the perfect moment. And then you just string those perfect moments together. A lot of films, they have all the money and time in the world, and all the life gets leeched out of them, which is not the case for Steven.”

“Restriction sometimes brings freedom,” Fassbender notes.

“Yeah,” Blanchett agrees. “Although you don’t want to say that to too many studio heads.”

How do they deal with the pressure that still comes, even with all their years of experience?

“We both get into cold water in the morning,” Blanchett says. She means this literally: On set during “Black Bag,” the two discovered that each begins their day with an ice bath as a way of building focus. Blanchett even took her family to the Arctic Circle over New Year’s and they all leapt into a fjord.

“I’ll give you the details,” she tells Fassbender, like she’s sharing a state secret, “It was really special.”

Her conspiratorial air vanishes as the hour comes to an end and her focus shifts back to “The Seagull.” Like spies, actors know how to adapt as they go.

Full interview on LA Times

“Black Bag,” an elegant, quick-witted new thriller that finds Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender playing married spies, isn’t the pair’s first time together on screen. That honor goes to 2017’s “Song to Song,” one of Terrence Malick’s most intangible and head-scratching offerings — though the two stars can barely recall that experience.

“We walked past one another,” Blanchett says, scrunching her temples as if searching valiantly for the memory.

“In the scene,” Fassbender, who is sitting to her right during an interview at Manhattan’s Whitby Hotel, interjects, helpfully filling in the gaps. “There was a very wealthy gentleman who had allowed us to use his house and his cars in the film — so he was in the scene as well.”

It clicks. “That’s right,” Blanchett says excitedly. “Literally every day working with Terry was going fishing, and you didn’t know whether you catch anything, or if you caught anything, whether you’re going to eat it. So I don’t even know if I’m even in the movie or if Terry just wanted me to hang around for a couple of weeks. Anyway, I wouldn’t say Michael and I really worked together.”

The pair more than make up for any lost screentime with “Black Bag,” which finds them both at the center of a mystery. Fassbender’s character, George Woodhouse, is tasked with finding out the identity of a double agent who is trying to sell a deadly cyberweapon to foreign buyers. There are five suspects at the top-secret organization, including George’s wife Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett). That leaves George potentially facing a terrible choice.

“They have a strong marriage,” Fassbender says. “He feels like she’s in his corner. There’s a deep sort of respect and understanding of one another. So when this happens, for George, it’s like, where should his loyalty lie? With his country or with his wife?”

Making “Black Bag” was also a chance for each actor to reunite with Steven Soderbergh, who Fassbender worked with on 2011’s “Haywire” and Blanchett collaborated with on 2006’s “The Good German.” As an added bonus, Blanchett says that the script by David Koepp had a richness and texture that was irresistible.

“Reading it, I just understood these characters — they had such distinct personalities — and the world was so easy to visualize,” she says. “And it’s a mid-budget film that is made for adults, which there’s hardly any of them out there. And very few filmmakers are better at doing those kind of smart, sophisticated stories than Steven.”

Soderbergh doesn’t just direct his movies; he also edits them and acts as cinematographer. So, on set, he’s wielding the camera, in addition to calling the shots.

“You sort of dance with him,” Fassbender says, swaying side to side. “He’s got this wonderful energy and he just permeates confidence throughout the set, because he is so competent. Not only is he operating the camera, he’s lighting the room, and then, of course, he’s going to edit everything later in the day. You feel like you’re in good hands.”

That was particularly important when it came to staging and shooting the film’s two most difficult sequences, both of which are set around a dining room table. In one, George invites all the suspects to a dinner party, where he puts a dollop of truth serum into the food and sits back to try to see who might reveal something. In the second, he reconvenes them to reveal who the mole actually is, a dramatic finale that takes some unexpected twists. Soderbergh had the actors run through the scenes once, purely so he could work out his camera movements and then chopped up the scene into smaller moments so he could keep the tension high.

“I found it discombobulating,” Blanchett admits. “We were sitting there a long time in between takes, talking about everything but the scene, so it would stay fresh. And then we’d do all these different pieces. On the second day, I lost track of things. It was like, ‘What are we doing again?’”

Beyond a get-to-know-you meal shortly before filming, Fassbender and Blanchett didn’t talk much about how they were approaching their parts or what their characters’ relationship was like before production began.

“I don’t much like having discussions,” Fassbender admits. “It doesn’t help me much. I want to see Cate’s interpretation when I get to set and what she’s throwing out there. It means I have to be listening and awake and trying to respond. I find doing that more exciting than talking about it.”

Neither actor consulted real-life spies, because the secrecy of their work means that they aren’t open to sharing office gossip with film stars. However, Blanchett did read memoirs of former agents.

“I discovered that for female spies there is still a kind of thoughtless misogyny within most of these agencies,” Blanchett says. “It’s infuriating because female operatives can actually garner a lot of subtle information that male operatives aren’t as attuned to getting. People open up to them more because they don’t expect women to be in the field.”

When it comes to her own profession, Blanchett has often been outspoken about how male-dominated and exclusionary it can be, while pushing for Hollywood to embrace more diversity both in front of and behind the camera. In 2023, for instance, she helped launch an accelerator program supporting women, trans and nonbinary filmmakers called Proof of Concept. It was part of a wave of initiatives that took place after the #MeToo movement and then the murder of George Floyd left studios and streamers pledging to shake up their hiring practices and workplace cultures. Since Donald Trump has been re-elected, however, vowing to end DEI programs, entertainment companies have been backing away from those promises or abandoning them entirely.

“I’m concerned about what it means for our wider, everyday lives because we’re a very public-facing industry,” Blanchett says. “It sends a bad signal.”

But she also believes that studios will realize they’re making a mistake if they go back to the old way of making movies and shows.

“If the landscapes and the sets and the writers’ rooms that we’re working on are homogenous, then the output will be dull, because homogeneity is the enemy of complex, exciting, dynamic art of any form,” Blanchett says. “Nobody wants that.”

Cate Blanchett on signing on to do the film:

“I just said, ‘Who am I playing?’  Blanchett revealed in the film’s production notes, adding that that she quickly hopped on board. “It was written by David and directed by Steven. That’s all I needed to know.”

Black Bag is the third project that Blanchett and Soderbergh have worked on together.

“Steven’s got amazing panache and range as a filmmaker,” Blanchett continued. “He doesn’t stay in the same lane. He understands the outsider’s perspective these characters have, the way they can move almost panther-like through the world.”

Blanchett also completely trusted Koepp’s work as a screenwriter. “David knows how to make great, propulsive narrative dramas that are also really fun,” she said. “He understands how to play with audience expectations in a delicious way, and then he delivers something even more satisfying than what you were expecting.”

Soderbergh is just as big a fan of Blanchett as she is of his work. The director noted that he previously worked with the Australian actress on other projects, including the 2006 crime film The Good German.

“Over the years, she’s always kept in touch to find out if there is anything we might work on together, which I’m flattered by,” Soderbergh said. “When there is, she gets it immediately.”

Soderbergh explained that Blanchett was a perfect choice for Kathryn, since the part needed someone who was not only an impressive actor, but who could pull off old-fashioned Hollywood glamour. “Cate just has both these qualities,” Soderbergh said.

Fassbender, who plays Kathryn’s husband George in Black Bag, shared that Blanchett not only brought all the qualities to her character that the script notes called for, but even some that he didn’t see specified there.

“Cate also brings something that I didn’t see on the page,” he explained. “There’s a lot of ambiguity in her performance. Kathryn has built a sturdy exterior wall even for George, but there is vulnerability within her as well. As their colleague Freddie says, the one thing that you can count on is that they’ll do anything for one another.

While the filmmakers, as well as some cast members, spoke to some real-life spies involved with the NCSC, who shared limited details about the trade, Blanchett revealed that she independently tried, and failed, to find a spy to advise her on her character.

“I suppose if I could find one, she probably wouldn’t be doing her job very well,” Blanchett said. “But Kathryn wasn’t based on any one person. This is more a portrait of their marriage and they happen to be in espionage.”

In the new espionage thriller Black Bag, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play Kathryn St. Jean and George Woodhouse, married British spies who aren’t always honest with each other out of necessity.

With national security information at stake, keeping secrets is just part of the job. Even something as seemingly simple as the location of a business trip may be off limits for discussion — those topics are referred to as being in the so-called “black bag.”

When George is tasked with finding out who at the National Cyber Security Centre is a potential traitor, he looks into several coworkers, played by Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Marisa Abela and Tom Burke. His own wife is on the list too.

“The weird thing about these characters is they work so closely with one another, and so they know operationally so much about one another and have a lot of information on one another, but yet they don’t actually know what’s going on with each other,” Blanchett tells PEOPLE.

“There’s an interiority to the characters that they have no idea about, no matter how many high stakes operations they’ve been involved in together, which is a very weird thing to play,” she continues.

Two pivotal dinner party scenes — during which George gets a close-up look at the people he’s investigating — take place in the Woodhouse-St. Jean home, a spectacular residence with a glass-walled garden just off the dining room.

In the center is what Blanchett calls a “beautiful tree, which is totally enclosed in glass,” as envisioned by production designer Phil Messina. “It’s very subtle in the background.”

“So it seemed to me a metaphor about the way they all lived their lives is that there was so much life, but it was entrapped,” says Blanchett.

Metaphors aside, “I had low-level anxiety for the health of the tree,” quips Blanchett.

The set — built at Pinewood Studios in England — was incredibly realistic and felt like a true home, adds Fassbender.

“We had a full house to walk around in,” he says. “You go up the stairs into the bedroom and our wardrobe-bathroom area — it was all built. And various people on the crew were like, ‘Oh, I want to take that oven and table and chairs.’ It was so beautifully designed.”

Cate Blanchett is discussing her new production of Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull when she brings up one of her pet peeves: audience participation in theater.

“It’s an act of aggression when people step off the stage and start singling people out,” the actress, 55, tells PEOPLE in an excluswith a touch of dry humor. (For the record, her show doesn’t have audience participation.)

Blanchett was in New York briefly to promote her new spy thriller Black Bag — costarring Michael Fassbender, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page and Pierce Brosnan — before jetting back to the U.K. for more performances.

But her brief and funny aside about audience participation brings to mind another of Blanchett’s annoyances: Leaf blowers. Through the years, the actress has been very vocal about her disdain for the devices, notably on a 2022 episode of Hot Ones.

Asked about it again, she doesn’t hold back. “They’re the most moronic invention,” says Blanchett. “They’re a symbol of all that is wrong with us as a species.”

As for whether she is surprised that various interview clips that feature her sounding off on leaf blowers have gone viral, the two-time Oscar winner says she isn’t. “I talk about it all the time,” Blanchett explains.

“You just got me going about leaf blowers. They’re moronic. I mean, if you see someone with a leaf blower, doesn’t your blood pressure go up?” she then asks Fassbender, 47, who has joined her for the interview.

“I usually hear them first,” the actor adds. “It’s the sound. I wonder when they’re going to come up with a silent leaf blower. But yeah, it’s like blowing the leaves in another place.”

“But blowing them from one side to the other during a windstorm. I mean …” responds Blanchett.

“Bring back the rake,” Fassbender then offers, as Blanchett agrees: “Yeah, bring back the rake.”

The easy banter between the costars translates to the screen. In Black Bag, they play married spies Kathryn St. Jean and George Woodhouse, who lie to each other out of necessity since their jobs require it.

As George is tasked with finding out who in his agency is a potential traitor, he looks into several coworkers, including Kathryn.

“The weird thing about these characters is they work so closely with one another, and so they know operationally so much about one another and have a lot of information on one another, but yet they don’t actually know what’s going on with each other,” says Blanchett.

Part of Soderbergh’s interview with Variety:

“With every project he makes, Steven likes to set an unsolvable problem for himself,” Blanchett says. “He likes making things that scare him.”

In a wide-ranging conversation before “Black Bag’s” starry premiere in New York City, Soderbergh admitted that what scares him right now is audiences. They keep insisting they want to see something smart and unique but might not turn up to theaters when presented with the genuine article.

Cate Blanchett said you told everyone on the set, “This is not a film. This is a movie.” What did you mean by that?
It’s a feeling, you know? It speaks to how you want the movie to be received by a viewer. And so for me to say it’s a movie, as opposed to being a film, implies a certain level of fun and a tone that isn’t heavy. There’s a version of this movie where you go a very different way. Where you don’t glam it up and you make it grittier and harder and kind of less fun. And that just wasn’t what I had in mind. We felt this was a real Hollywood movie and you should get movie stars, and you should make them look great. That was the movie I wanted to make.

Full interview with Variety

MASSIVE SPOILER! Just highlight the text after the first dash symbol to read it.

Steven Soderbergh talks about the film’s ending and possible sequel.

Black Bag, which hit theaters Friday, presents audiences with a portrait of a marriage between two spies, George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). When George is handed a list of possible traitors, including Kathryn, he immediately sets out to discover whether her wife is lying to him.

— After an extensive game of cat-and-mouse, which at first appears to indicate Kathryn is playing both sides, George uncovers the real villain — his colleague James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), who expressly defied orders and attempted to initiate a nuclear meltdown in Russia that had the potential to cost thousands of lives.

George and Kathryn’s confrontation with James eventually ends with his death (and the disposal of his body in a lake). And the couple is seemingly happier than ever, sharing their bed and vowing their loyalty to each other — even if some secrets must remain in their metaphorical “black bag.” But can they ever truly trust each other?

Both Fassbender and director Steven Soderbergh imagine that Kathryn and George will continue on past the film’s conclusion much as they were. “It’s a continual thing,” Fassbender reflects. “To ever think, ‘Okay, life is going to be easier now,’ no, this is the world that they live in. They’re all looking over their shoulder within their own organization. Just the idea of going to work and in your workspace you’re constantly being observed and assessed and this level of distrust is a resting place for everyone. Paranoia is always humming in the background. So I think it goes on as we left off and their relationship as well.”

As for Soderbergh, he thinks that while Kathryn and George may continue to face new problems as a result of their jobs, this particular issue won’t be one that plagues them a second time. ” I don’t think they’ll face this problem again,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean even graver threats wouldn’t be on the horizon. In fact, Soderbergh reveals that screenwriter David Koepp already has an idea in mind for a potential sequel. “If we were fortunate enough with success to be asked to continue this story, David has a really good idea,” says Soderbergh. “I don’t want to jinx it, but it would be an even more serious problem that they would be confronting.”

The director also notes that the cast have expressed interest in returning if the project were on the table.

While he won’t share specifics, Soderbergh notes that the concept for a second film circles around the repercussions of Black Bag’s events. “The idea that David has plays into this idea of there will be a consequence to the fact they took that action [and killed James],” he says. “That’s not going to go away. You just don’t disappear somebody who works in that business and never have to confront your role in it. So David’s idea of how this circles back to them is really interesting.” —

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