“In the travel aspect, I think it’s when you are sitting on a plane when you’re done [with your flight] and they won’t let you take your seat belt off, that is my hell, the five minutes,” says Abela, 28, who stars as junior intelligence agent Clarissa Dubose, and is known for her role in the BBC Two and HBO series Industry. But British star Page, 37, who stars as Colonel James Stokes, says he would treat the black bag “a bit like room 101. “Voice notes. If you have some information to give me, like, what time are we meeting, and you’ve got to send me a five-minute voice note… and you tell a story and then put the thing that you need as your answer, four minutes and 30 seconds into the voice note, that’s going in the black bag. I’m done with [it],” says Page. Naomie Harris, 48, who stars as Zoe Vaughan, a psychiatrist and Colonel James Stokes’s lover, adds:“This is good to know because that is how I operate. “I think any experiences that have haunted me and changed me as a person, I’d like to put in a black bag and throw into the river, never seeing them again,” says Harris, who played Eve Moneypenny in the James Bond films Skyfall, Spectre, and No Time to Die.
is very much about that type of energy in a room.”
It’s no surprise that Page says working with Soderbergh was such an “immersive and extremely natural process… especially because Soderbergh was often operating the camera himself”, he adds. “Steven [Soderbergh] watches every detail of every scene like a hawk. It allows him to react to anything that he had not planned for and capture unexpected moments very viscerally.” In the film,Arthur Stieglitz, played by Irish actor and Bond star Pierce Brosnan, 71, asks George Woodhouse to investigate what his wife Kathryn Woodhouse has been up to.
This leaves George deciding if he would be loyal to his marriage or the country that he serves.
“There was definitely a puzzle for George to solve, but I don’t know if his loyalty would have ever swayed from his wife. I think it’s what those two characters actually have going for them that the other characters don’t have,” says Fassbender, who also gained mainstream success for playing Erik Lehnsherr, also known as Magneto, in the American superhero film series X-Men. “They have each other in this world, which can be very isolating and essentially very lonely.There’s so much sacrifice in terms of the relationships that you can maintain, and they’ve been very successful in doing it, by the way they operate. “And it’s kind of an interesting analogy on marriage, how much do you take and how much do you keep to yourself. But the loyalty for him, I think, is always going to lie with his wife. He is somebody who’s sort of very uncompromising when it comes to finding out the truth of any scenario, but what he does with the information, I don’t think would sway from where his loyalty lies to his wife.”
Like Fassbender and Blanchett, Page is really intentional about doing what he can with what he has got.
It’s a mantra that has impacted the way he navigates his day-to-day life and challenges his work as an actor.
“It gives you both self-forgiveness and the responsibility to be generous,” says Page, who joined the cast of the Netflix period drama Bridgerton as charismatic duke, Simon Basset. It earned him an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series. “My favourite thing about this film is finding unexpected moments in the scenes of the actors. It’s such an insanely well-cast film that the level you’re working at is the highest that I think you can achieve at this point.And I think that that demands the generosity of a performer. “Everyone around that table, between Michael [Fassbender], Cate [Blanchett], myself, Naomie [Harris], Marisa [Abela],Tom [Burke], everyone is giving it back on the other side of the camera, everyone is reacting to what you put out and expecting that same level of investment and reaction back, no matter where the camera is pointing. “And that is how I would define doing what you can what you got in that situation, it is giving everyone else access to what you have to bring in service of their performances. And I think how Steven [Soderbergh] worked on this film
Black Bag came to UK cinemas on Friday, March 14
44 | mccarthyholden.co.uk
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