Did you believe Michael Fassbender was retiring? Did you think George Clooney was done with his prodigious directing turn of the last few years? Guess again on all fronts, as Fassbender is negotiating to star in a new espionage thriller series from Clooney called “The Department.”
According to Variety, the series is supposed to shoot this spring in London and has already been given a straight-to-series order from Showtime. “The Department” is based on “The Bureau,” a hit French spy show created by showrunner Eric Rochant (you can watch that trailer below).
The original French series starred Matthieu Kassovitz (“Amelie,” “La Haine,” “Munich”) as a member of a clandestine branch of the French Secret Services (DGSE) who returns to his home base after a six-year mission in Damascus. Fassbender would presumably play an updated version of that character. A Canal+ show in France, evidently, it was a big hit thanks to its examination of the psychology of secret agents and inclusion of geopolitical issues that resonated with current events and international locations.
Here’s the French series synopsis:
Within the French Secret Service, one department known as the DGSE manages the missions of all undercover operatives working under fake identities to identify intelligence sources. After six years undercover in Syria, agent “Malotru” is called back home. He will face the difficulty to forget his undercover identity, the disappearance of a colleague in Algeria & the training of a young girl.
The series will be produced by Clooney and Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse Pictures, MTV Entertainment Studios, and 101 Studios, the latter being Taylor Sheridan’s company that makes “Yellowstone” and a ton of television.
Clooney has directed three films since 2020, “The Midnight Sky,” “The Tender Bar,” and released last December, “The Boys In The Boat.” After having a child, Fassbender pivoted to auto-racing, a passion of his, and took a long break from acting. Following 2019’s “X-Men: Dark Phoenix,” he didn’t appear in a live-action film until 2023’s “The Killer” with David Fincher and Taika Waititi’s “Next Goal Wins.”
If there’s one question to be had in this recent announcement is, when will Fassbender fit in Steven Sodebergh’s spy project, “Black Bag,” starring Cate Blanchett? Acquired by Focus Features earlier this year, that project was also thought to be soon or the spring in the U.K., but perhaps that plan has changed.
