Jodie Turner-Smith on Portraying a Sudanese Woman in ‘The Agency’: “We Should All Be Able to Play Each Other”

[This story contains spoilers from the two-episode premiere of The Agency.]

In the early minutes of the premiere episode of The Agency, Martian (Michael Fassbender), an undercover CIA agent whose real name is Paul Lewis, relays to his operations officer (Katherine Waterston) how he broke things off with his lover Samia Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith) as he prepares to leave his longterm covert mission in Addis Ababa and return to his station in London. The scene, even without the broader context of the depth of Martian and Samia’s relationship or an explanation for why he had to end things — and furthermore detail how he did so — sets up for the audience the struggle at the center of the Showtime drama: Martian’s plight to have an honest life of his own.

“I’m fascinated by what espionage stories can tell us about ourselves in a way,” executive producer Joe Wright tells The Hollywood Reporter. “This one in particular is the story of a man who’s trying to escape the lies of his past in order to live a more authentic life and to be able to love authentically. That, I think, is something that we all are trying to do, especially in this day and age. Transparency seems to be quite a theme of our contemporary world.”      

The Agency, which also stars Richard Gere and Jeffrey Wright, is based on the French series Le Bureau, and is written and executive produced by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth with Joe directing the first two episodes.

“Certainly at the beginning, we need to have a sense of the intimacy that these characters share,” Wright says of setting up Martian and Samia’s dynamic. “A sense of it being the only place where they can be their authentic selves. A sense of relaxation, a sense of safety, that then slowly becomes suspect, that slowly we begin to not trust, we begin to doubt the other, and we begin to, therefore, sort of doubt ourselves.”

While it’s immediately evident to viewers that Martian is keeping his true identity a secret from Samia, there’s a mystery that also surrounds the married multilingual Sudanese professor of anthropology who, by the end of episode one, finds herself in London and back in Martian’s life, to the degree the CIA will allow it.

“Samia’s got stuff going on,” Turner-Smith tells THR, adding that she watched Le Bureau in preparation for her role, though she knew the Butterworths would be bringing the series, first started in 2015, into the modern era. “I heavily referenced the source material not as a way to determine who Samia was going to be, but to have an understanding of the show and what the show is saying and where the show is going.”

Here the British Jamaican actress shares why she believes Black actors should be able to portray men and women across the African diaspora, scratching Fassbender off of her dream list of people to work with and the example of self-agency she’s setting for her daughter following her separation from Joshua Jackson in 2023.

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How did the role of Samia come to you?

It first came to me by way of a meeting with Joe Wright who I have been a fan of for a long time. Atonement has literally burned itself onto my cerebral cortex. Pride and Prejudice, Hanna, there are so many projects. I love the way that he handles material that involves love and longing. And then finding out that this was based on an already wildly successful very good, very popular French program, I watched that, and I was blown away. Before even all of that, I knew that Michael Fassbender was the one who was starring in this role, and Michael is someone I’ve been a fan of for years. Been on my list of like, “I would die to work with that actor.” Thank God I didn’t have to die to work with him. I’m alive! Hallelujah, praise God, thank you Jesus. I’m alive working with him and it’s great. He’s so talented, he’s kind, he’s generous, he’s a completely unserious person, he’s the first one to crack a joke and it’s just been such a good experience for me.

Did you have any nerves first meeting Michael?

Of course. I’m alive. I feel like if I’m not nervous I’m dead inside — dead actually and/or inside. Yes, I was nervous and also, it’s daunting. You meet someone who’s a big, massive fucking movie star, and you’re like, what’s this guy going to be like? Is he going to be kind? Does he hate women? It’s always an important question when you’re meeting a man. Does he hate women? And the answer to all of that was, no, he does not hate women. Is he kind? Yes. He’s generous as an actor. That’s the other thing. I feel being in a scene with someone is also about holding space for that person and their performance. And not every performer is generous in that way, you know? And not out of malice necessarily, some people are just so in their heads about their own stuff. But he is truly a pro. I am so grateful that I got to do all this work with him and as much as I wish I could have also worked with Jeffrey and Richard, I feel lucky, I feel blessed, I feel fortunate that I did nearly all of my work with [Michael].

How did you feel about tackling your character’s accent? What was the process of working on that?

I’m always nervous about accents because accent work — look, no matter how much work you put into it, you’re never going to speak another language as a native speaker, like someone who is born speaking that language, taught in that language, thinks in that language, dreams in that language. But we can do our level best to bring as much integrity and passion and nuance to that as we can and that’s what we try to do. I had an incredible dialect coach in Khaled, in terms of the Arabic that we spoke, and I’m proud of it. I firmly believe that we in the diaspora should be able to play all of us, who we are descendants of, natives of, relatives of on the African continent. We should all be able to play each other. It’s honoring each other. We are all having a shared experience across the globe and there are nuances to each of our cultures that we then get as performers and artists to bring into our performances to honor, to research, to dedicate ourselves, to bring to light, and I get to do that, and that makes me very happy. I never take it lightly when I get to play somebody from another place and to do an accent. I’m often asked to do an accent. I do a not-so-bad job at them. Do I always get it right? No, but I commit. It’s the only thing you can do with accent work. If you’re not committed, it’s felt. And I hope that people are happy with the performance and the commitment to the nuance of culture and that someone somewhere feels seen in a way differently than they ever have been before.

I also love that I got to play a dark-skinned Sudanese woman, not specifically South Sudanese but Sudanese, because the representation of Sudanese women as well as Sudanese people is often fairer, more Arab-looking. I love playing a dark-skinned Sudanese woman speaking Arabic on this show. We speak a lot of Arabic on this show. We put in a lot of hours of effort. I studied and I look forward to continuing to study that language. I believe it’s one of the most beautiful languages on this planet and I hope that Arabic-speaking peoples, even those not from Sudan, when they watch this, they feel like it’s a great representation of them and of the language and of the culture. I worked hard on that.

Samia’s wardrobe is so striking against the kind of gray tone of the series overall and when I saw the blue Robert Wun ensemble you wore to the MTV EMAs, I wondered was it a nod to your character?

Someone else said that!

Do you feel connected to her through fashion?

Do you know what? This character, the look of this character was 100 percent completely our wonderful costume designer. This was her vision for Samia. What she represented as a color palette inside of this world of The Agency was deliberate and specific, and I loved living into that. I think that I make a great canvas for color, all different kinds of colors, and I rose to the occasion in that sense, I believe, and I hope that people do love it. Sometimes I’m very much the one who’s driving the conversation of what my character looks like, and sometimes I’m along for the ride. On this one I was much more along for the ride. I definitely am always there giving my thumbs up or thumbs down but this was very much her and she had such a clear vision, a specific vision, an excellent vision. A lot of those clothes we made, we didn’t just buy off the rack. It’s incredible, I can’t wait for people to see it and love it. It, I think, speaks spiritually and energetically to what Samia represents for Martian and for Paul Lewis and also for the show. And I love being the bright spot of color.

Getting to film back home in England for six months, what was that like?

I did love that element of it. It was nice to be in England doing this. I really enjoyed that, and hopefully, there’s more to come.

More stars are talking about making an exodus to Europe in light of the election. Would you ever consider moving back home?

Look, I live in LA, ultimately, but I definitely want to have a life that says that I’m a citizen of the world and I hope to have enough success to have the ability to move around the world as freely as possible. The perspective that you gain, the knowledge that you gain, the empathy and compassion that you gain from leaving your home country or your resident country is invaluable. I have so much more to offer the world and my family and my daughter as a person who travels around and who travels with her, but we are Los Angelenos. We’ll always have a place there too, but I’m going to have my house in L.A., my house in London, my house in Jamaica. I’m going to have these things because I’m working hard for them.

With this role and recently being named a Glamour UK Woman of the Year, how are you feeling in this chapter of your career and life?

Honestly, I feel so good. Work is really going so splendidly, and I continue to work hard. I put all of myself into something and this is my craft, this is the thing that I love. I get to nurture this gift. Yes, okay, it is a job. It is, but I love to do it. That’s why I do it. I had a job that was just a job. I didn’t like it because I felt unfulfilled. I felt disconnected from purpose. I felt unhappy. This gives me so much joy. And I feel that that fulfillment and that joy is going to inspire my child, my gyal pickney. Because in this world, as women especially, living in a world that is constantly telling us that we don’t have any agency, we’re not allowed to have agency, we’re not allowed to have control over our bodies, we’re not allowed to say what we want and do what we want, it is important to live in that truth of no, I am powerful. My life is mine. I’m in the driver seat of this life. My life is not dictated by men.

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The first two episodes of The Agency are now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime. Episodes drop weekly, streaming Friday and with a linear premiere Sunday, Dec. 1st at 9pm on Showtime.