Yahoo Lifestyle 'Black Bag' Cast Breaks Down Those Blood-Drenched Dinner Party Scenes (Exclusive)
Custom dictates that dinner party guests should bring a bottle of wine or a dish to pass, but in Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh's latest spy thriller, guests are more likely to bring a loaded gun.
"It was fun. We keep saying the word 'intense,' but it was fun too," says Tom Burke of the dinner party scenes. "It has to be. When it's that intense, you have to have a bit of pressure release in between takes."
Burke plays intelligence operative Freddie Smalls, one of five suspects invited to the home of George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) when he learns there's a mole in his intelligence operation. The other suspects include Col. Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), therapist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), computer guru Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela) and Woodhouse's own wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett).
Parade sits down with all six dinner party guests to chat about everything that went into filming the dinner party scenes, which included Burke's character being stabbed in the hand with a dinner knife.
"That was fun," Burke laughs. "I mean, that was a whole lot of people doing a lot of hard work and me doing nothing at all."
For Page, those tense confrontation-heavy dinner scenes enticed him to sign up for Black Bag.
"The heart of this movie is in those dinner party scenes, and it's very much the first thing that jumps out of the script," he says. "Yes, the script is great. Yes, Steven Soderbergh is directing. But then this cast with those scenes, which almost feels like doing Chekhov with your fellow cast mates. You're throwing it across the table. Something super interesting and unexpected is coming back. You relish coming into work every day."
The dinner party scenes are oddly reminiscent of Peacock's reality TV hit The Traitors, which Abela is up to date on. "I'll brag here for a second," she says, "I had dinner last night with Dorinda Medley from Real Housewives of New York. I feel like I've reached the apex." Medley was the first player eliminated from Season 3 of The Traitors. "I was furious, obviously," says Abela.
In between the stabbed hands, gunshots and Chekhov-esque confrontations, George and Kathryn, both spies, are sorting through their own relationship. On the surface the two appear to have complete faith in one another, but could Kathryn be double crossing him?
"They're a couple who interrogate absolutely everything for a living, second guess everything," Blanchett says about the couple. "In order to hold onto their sanity and make their relationship work, they don't interrogate one another."
"If you speak to them or listen to interviews that they've given after they've left the service, they find it very hard to maintain a relationship," Blanchett continues, referencing work she did to build her character. "[Kathryn and George] have just decided that this can only work if we have deep trust. So that was a really interesting thing to play. I mean we all hope we'd have that with our life partner, but it doesn't always happen that way."
That "deep trust" was built over a short period of time between Blanchett and Fassbender, who didn't know each other prior to Black Bag.
"Obviously I knew him as an actor, and I am a huge admirer of his work, knowing how much it costs," says Blanchett of Fassbbender. "We had a small role, or a walk-by role, in a Terrence Malick film. I don't even know that the scene ended up in the movie. We'd met before, but we'd never really done anything this complex."
Of course there's no dinner party without a dining room, and the one in George and Kathryn's house is something out of Architectural Digest. While the outside of the house was a real building, the interiors were constructed on a soundstage.
"I am always bowled over by the scenic artists who work on studio films," Blanchett says. "We constructed the house because most of the film, apart from one or two breakouts, is in these really contained spaces. The house is obviously Kathryn and George's home, so it was a huge character in the film."
If you'd like to see the real house, Harris says it's located near Canonbury Square in the London borough of Islington ("where my very first house was when I got married," adds Blanchett).
Related: Cate Blanchett's Husband Andrew Upton Shows How You Win the Heart of a Leading Lady
Another fun fact about the dinner party scenes is that, according to Fassbender, his wife, Oscar winner Alicia Vikander "did a little playlist that Steven used in the film, so she has a guest credit. DJ Vikarious. That's Alicia."
While the food was perhaps the least interesting part of the Black Bag dinner parties, Fassbender does think food is a vital part of any film set.
"You can tell who the most committed actor at the table is because it'll be the person eating the food," he says.
So who is the most committed actor in Black Bag? "There's no competition," Page says. It's Burke. According to Abela, he was so committed he was asking for seconds, which is the sign of any successful dinner party after all.
