Jodie Turner-Smith Easily Created Chemistry with Michael Fassbender on ‘The Agency’: “I Truly Believe I Have Made a Friend in Him”

Showtime’s latest political espionage drama, The Agency, is here to indulge your love for spy-filled stories with a cast of renowned actors. Adapted from the French show Le Bureau des Legendes, The Agency debuted on Paramount+ and Showtime, featuring “Martian” (played by Michael Fassbender), a CIA operative who is sent back to London Station after a stint living covertly in Ethiopia.

This results in him leaving behind his relationship with Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), an anthropology professor introduced at the very start of Episode 1.

**Warning: Light spoilers ahead for The Agency Episode 1.**

While speaking with DECIDER ahead of The Agency‘s debut, Turner-Smith admitted that sparking chemistry with Fassbender on set was “the least challenging aspect” of capturing their relationship on screen.

“You know, I personally think that Michael Fassbender could have chemistry with a brick wall, and I feel the same about myself,” she quipped.

Though this isn’t necessarily the end for Sami and Martian — whom Sami knows as his undercover alias, Paul Lewis — Turner-Smith highlighted that fans meet the couple in the midst of a break-up, citing the “awkwardness” and “distance” involved in that interaction. Nonetheless, she described their chemistry as “just so easy.”

“I really think that I have found a friend in this, in Michael Fassbender, and so I was working with my friend. It was awesome and I was learning so much,” she shared.

Turner-Smith, who recently starred in the Apple TV+ dark comedy Bad Monkey, said she doesn’t think she’s “played a woman like Sami” in the past, insisting that “each woman has her own nuances, and desires, and belief system and everything.” She shared that she “drew on the knowledge” of a Sudanese cultural consultant, as well as a dialect coach, explaining, “There’s something very interesting that happens with language which I think adds nuance to the character, as well.”

“Within everyone’s own language and culture, there’s a different way that they express themselves,” she added. “They gesticulate, they get angry, all those things. And so it’s very interesting to find that person based on all these new bits of knowledge that I was getting about who she was culturally and ideologically.”

As viewers watch Martian and Sami’s separation play out on-screen, they also meet Naomi (Katherine Waterston), an Operations Officer and Martian’s handler, as Martian reports back to her about his departure over video chat. Interestingly enough, despite working together for quite some time, Naomi and Martian only meet in person for the first time in Episode 1, an interaction that Waterston described as “very awkward” for the two characters.

“A very strange and interesting aspect of doing this work is that sometimes you are assigned to someone who is in the field while they’re halfway through an operation,” she elaborated. “So they never had met in person before, but it was her job for a number of years to be his closest confidante. So they have this intimacy, but it’s a virtual intimacy.”

Waterston said that “so much” drew her to the role of Naomi, including that “she is excellent at her job, that the world of the CIA makes so much sense to her, that that is her refuge and the place where she shines, and that actually the rest of life is a bit harder for her to navigate.”

“It’s always thrilling, because it’s rare, to receive a script where a character right off the bat shows a great deal of complexity, and to see a character that contains multitudes and contradictions,” she said. “That’s the most exciting thing for an actor. It’s dull and unrealistic to play a person who has a single trait.”

She detailed Naomi’s work ethic as something that prevents her from having a personal life, noting that “it serves the job to have no attachments.”

“So I think the ways in which we justify what we do and who we are that allow us to actually remain stunted and not really develop certain areas of our lives, I think all of that is very interesting. It’s also just really fun to play somebody who is under control and very good at what they do, and then try to find those little fissures where something’s starting to crack or not quite work,” she shared, adding that she has become “very attached” to the character.

Richard Gere — a self-described fan of Le Bureau des Legendes who marks his first major TV role in The Agency as Bosko, the London Station Chief — told us that his character’s past experience in the field was “important” for him to incorporate as Bosko “evolved” on screen.

“He wasn’t a political appointee, but he was someone who came up through the ranks,” he explained. “He had been there. He’d been on the ground, in the cold, [a] spy himself. And I think that allows him to have very macro and micro conversations with everyone in the story. He gets the overview, but he gets the inner view of the conflicts of the people who are continually doing things that may violate their sense of humanity, but are serving something that they hope is larger and better than themselves.”

Gere recalled arriving in London to start shooting the series “in the middle of the night,” where he discovered that “the scale of this [series] was actually quite a bit larger than the French one.”

“I had in my mind that it was going to be maybe more in that vein, but this is a huge thing,” he said. “I mean, there were monitors 360 degrees of London all around us that were being run by guys and computers underneath where the sets were. It was a mammoth production.”

Nonetheless, Gere felt the two shows are “very similar in terms of the feel.”

“It’s intimate, it’s character-driven, it has all the problems and the issues of people who do this kind of thing for a living,” he added. “Identity crises and how do you juggle some semblance of a personal life with this fiction that you’re living out.”

The first two episodes of The Agency are streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.