Agreeing to star in “The Agency” was an easy yes for Richard Gere given the star was already a fan of the espionage drama’s source material. But differentiating this Paramount+ with Showtime original from the French “The Bureau” was entirely different matter.
“It looked like a movie. It was long-form version of movie storytelling with very rich and complicated characters,” Gere told TheWrap when asked why he enjoyed “The Bureau.” The Canal+ espionage thriller originally ran from 2015 to 2020 and focused on what Gere described as “post-colonial Earth and what culture has done to culture.”
“[‘The Agency’] is dealing with the present since then, and certainly from the American point of view. It’s dealing with the former Soviet Union. It’s dealing with Putin. It’s dealing with Ukraine. It’s dealing with Africa, the Middle East. It’s it’s all that stuff that’s in our world right now and filtered through these very personal stories,” Gere explained. “Hopefully, there’s a degree of realism in this that it won’t feel like a telenovela, but it’ll feel like we’re really immersed in a genuine world.”
“The Agency” zooms in on Martian (Michael Fassbender), a CIA agent who’s been deep undercover for over six years. When a new threat forces Martian to be unexpectedly pulled out of his mission, he must try to quickly readapt to his new assignment while explaining his absence to the daughter and girlfriend he left behind. In this world full of secrets and mysteries, Gere plays Bosko, Martian’s boss and the highest ranking officer in London. It was important to Gere that Bosko felt like someone who cut his teeth doing fieldwork rather than being just another suit.
“When they sent me a script originally, I said, ‘Look, what would interest me is if we loosen him up a little bit. We make him someone who has been on the street himself,’” Gere explained. “But his job is to be macro right now. He’s expressing a worldview of Congress, of the State Department, of the President United States, of the director of the CIA. At the same time, he’s out there, kind of on his own in London managing Europe, the Middle East and Africa. And there’s a lot of black ops that are going on.”
Because his character is so high ranking, Gere’s very first day on set was a challenging one. By the time the A-lister arrived on the production, the cast and crew had been shooting for roughly a month, meaning they had grown comfortable with each other.
“I came in the first day to shoot, and I had to be the boss. At the same time, I also had to know them all. And unfortunately, the first scene we did I was very upset with them,” Gere said. “It was that was a day of experimentation, of finding the character, but then finding the character upset in extremis, so it was a little tricky.”
But just as much as an American version of “The Bureau” sold Gere on the project, he was equally excited by its cast. Gere listed his co-stars Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Dominic West and Hugh Bonneville as a major “selling point” for him. The role even allowed him to flex his comedy chops with Wright, who plays Bosko’s righthand man, Henry.
“There’s scenes in it that have to play funny,” Gere said. “We have to have that shorthand about the mechanics of just getting the work done as if it was a normal office. At the same time, we’re talking about assassinations and Black Ops and all kinds of crazy stuff.”
There aren’t many remaining actors quite like Richard Gere. The living legend made a name for himself early in his career by starring in complicated theatrical dramas like “Primal Fear,” “American Giglio” and “An Officer and a Gentleman.” Though the Hollywood landscape has changed and these types of movies are becoming even more of a rarity, he doesn’t see their evolution as moving to television. Instead, he sees the next wave of complex storytelling in the world of independent film.
“The last 10 to 15 movies I have made have all been independent, very low budgets. We have another one that’s opening up. Paul Schrader and I made a movie for somewhere around $5 million, and we shot it in 17 to 18, days,” Gere said. “The world television does something else. The budget that was allocated for our thing each episode, I probably could have made 10 independent films. So it’s its own creature now, but it’s shot like the way we make movies and by movie people — the DPs and cinematographers are movie guys, the director is a movie guy, the actors are movie actors. We shoot the same way, but it’s this long format.”
New episodes of “The Agency” premiere on Paramount+ with Showtime on Fridays.
