Black Bag’s Michael Fassbender reveals the scene change he ‘panicked’ over

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Black Bag star Michael Fassbender has shared that he was “panicking” after his preparation for one particular scene was scuppered by a late change.

The spy thriller, which is directed by Steven Soderbergh, sees Fassbender play a British intelligence officer whose wife (Cate Blanchett) is suspected of betraying the nation, leaving him torn between his loyalty to his country and his family.

One scene sees Fassbender’s character administer a polygraph test to three colleagues, with the action cutting between each interview. Despite the scene being written with cross-cutting in mind, Soderbergh elected to film each interrogation in full, a decision that left Fassbender “panicking.”

“That was definitely the most challenging scene for me because in the script, it jumps between the characters as it’s written dialogue-wise,” the actor told Entertainment Weekly. “So that’s the way I learned it.

“But then on the day Steven was like, ‘You’re just going to do all of Clarissa’s (Marisa Abela) dialogue in one, and you’re going to do all of Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and all of Freddie’s (Tom Burke).’

I didn’t learn it through that method, and I keep asking similar questions to every character, but there are small variations. In fact, I was getting quite flustered, with the pages scattered everywhere.

Soderbergh, whose recent projects include Presence and Kimi, noted that the setup made the most practical sense, explaining: “It makes perfect sense if you’re on a normal movie to memorise the script as written.

“It just turned out that in order to do this most efficiently, everybody had to be shot from these four different angles. I would set up two of them at a time and just rotate them in and out. As I explained that to Michael, he went, ‘Oh shit.’ He had to scramble his brain and get that sorted out.”

Black Bag is in cinemas now.

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2025-03-17 01:20