“They’re star-crossed lovers,” says Turner-Smith, with a nod to Romeo and Juliet. “This is a spy show, but I think at its heart it’s a love story. It’s about two people that are trying to find each other again, and then in finding each other, they realise that their love is actually the thing that makes them dangerous to one other.”
There are no shortage of premium spy thrillers on TV, with Slow Horses lauded at the Emmys, a new series of Le Carre’s The Night Manager in the works, The Day of the Jackal having just wowed us all with Eddie Redmayne, and even Homeland still fond in the memory. The Agency looks to prosper by bringing in the biggest of big hitters: the English film director Joe Wright (Atonement, Darkest Hour) takes the reins in his first foray in to series television; Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs, 12 Years a Slave), bringing A-list Hollywood pizzazz, and alongside Turner-Smith there’s a cavalcade of stars, from Jeffrey Wright to Katherine Waterston to none other than Richard Gere as the CIA head.
Richard Gere and Michael Fassbender in The Agency.Credit: Luke Varley/Paramount+
It’s got good genes, too: the French hit on which The Agency is based (Le Bureau des légendes, which follows the daily life and missions of agents within France’s principal external security service), has been named as one of the top international shows of the decade by The New York Times and “one of the best TV shows in the world”, by NPR.
But The Agency still shakes the dice. Turner-Smith’s lover/nemesis gains a more central role, and CIA operations are shown to have global ramifications.
“The character is so interesting,” says Turner-Smith, who is British/American but lives in Los Angeles, “because even when she’s not there, she’s there, you know? She exists as this figure that is sort of motivating this tangled web that Paul Lewis, aka Martian, is weaving. And I loved that.”
She says that while she didn’t initially want to watch the French version – “I didn’t want to feel like I was tying myself in to something” – in the end she did catch an episode or two … and was instantly hooked.
The original and highly acclaimed French Le Bureau des legendes.Credit: Jessica Forde
“I was so invested in the love story that I just couldn’t stop watching, and so definitely something that I took into this was that I wanted to make sure that we really root for these two people to be together. You have to feel how much they love each other because it’s literally a thing that motivates everything, for good and for bad.”
Nadia in Le Bureau was Syrian. Turner-Smith’s Sami is Sudanese. Turner-Smith’s parents are Jamaican – she was the only one of her siblings not born in Jamaica. After her parents divorced, aged 11 she emigrated to the United States with her mother, brother and half-sister. So she has a subtle feel for cross-cultural difference and assimilation that she was determined to bring to Sami.
“We had a really amazing Sudanese consultant to teach us about the culture, about the geopolitical conflicts, about the nuances. For me, I feel like my job as an actor is to take a character off the page and fill it with nuance so that it becomes a real person. Is it always going to be a depiction that makes everybody happy? Maybe not, but if there can be at least enough truth in it, my hope is that someone who is really from there feels seen in some way.”
India Fowler and Michael Fassbender in The Agency.Credit: Paramount+
That includes language. Sami is supposed to be a Sudanese academic and there is a lot of Arabic dialect in the show.
“Yes,” says Turner-Smith, “so she will be talking to people that are from her country, that she’s working with, and so I put in a lot of hours in trying to make sure that I honoured this beautiful language that is Arabic. You know, I had spoken Arabic once before on a TV show that I did, like, years and years ago. I mean … I don’t know. I think that my dialect coach was happy! You always want to touch on one thing that indicates that you’ve f—ing done your research.”
Sami also looks incredible, sweeping in to scenes in brightly coloured silks, headscarves and wraps.
“That was not just about like, ‘Oh, she’s wearing this’, it was also about what she represents in the whole story, the way that she appears in these scenes, which she looks in these scenes, compared to everyone else,” she says.
“She is this factor that disrupts Paul Lewis, aka Martian’s, life. So in everything that I wore, it was always something that stood out. Something that interrupted the monotony of the canvas that was otherwise painted.”
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And yet even as Sami strides into every scene, throwing Martian out of kilter, it is impossible to know who we are watching. As so often in espionage drama, she is first and foremost an uncommonly good actor.
“I get the parallels,” Turner-Smith laughs. “You know, putting on someone else’s life, living inside of that, pretending. It’s all playing a role.”
Which leads me to an overwhelming question: could she do it? Could she marshal the skills that have enabled her not to reveal even the tiniest inkling of a spoiler to me in our fierce bout of cross-questioning?
“Do I think I’d be a good spy? I mean, I feel like I’d be quite anxious. The stakes are so much higher: it’s like life or death. And then there’s torture. But then maybe there’s that side of me that just needs to succeed so much that I’d be like, ‘No way. You’re not going to f—ing catch me’.”
The Agency screens on Paramount+ from November 30.
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