In Black Bag, Soderbergh’s elegant, witty new thriller, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play happily married spies.

The pair worked together in 2017’s “Song to Song,” one of Terrence Malick’s weakest offerings — though they can barely recall that experience. “We walked past one another,” Blanchett says

Fassbender’s character, George Woodhouse, is tasked with finding out the identity of a double agent who is trying to sell a deadly cyberweapon to foreign buyers. There are five suspects at the top-secret organization, including George’s wife Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett).

Making “Black Bag” offered a chance for to reunite Soderbergh. Fassbender had worked with him on 2011’s Haywire, and Blanchett collaborated with on 2006’s The Good German (both mediocre efforts)

Blanchett says that the script for Black Box by David Koepp had a richness and texture that made it irresistible.

“Reading it, I just understood these characters — they had such distinct personalities — and the world was so easy to visualize,” she says. “It’s a mid-budget film that is made for adults, which there’s hardly any of them out there. And very few filmmakers are better at doing those kind of smart, sophisticated stories than Steven.”

Notes Fassbender: “You sort of dance with him. He’s got this wonderful energy and he just permeates confidence throughout the set, because he is so competent. Not only is he operating the camera, he’s lighting the room, and then, of course, he’s going to edit everything later in the day. You feel like you’re in good hands.”

In one, George invites all the suspects to a dinner party, where he puts a dollop of truth serum into the food and sits back to try to see who might reveal something.

In the second, he reconvenes them to reveal who the mole actually is, a dramatic finale with unexpected twists. Soderbergh had the actors run through the scenes once, purely so he could work out his camera movements and then chopped up the scene into smaller moments so he could keep the tension high.

“I found it discombobulating,” Blanchett admits. “We were sitting there a long time in between takes, talking about everything but the scene, so it would stay fresh. And then we’d do all these different pieces. On the second day, I lost track of things. It was like, ‘What are we doing again?’”

Regé-Jean Page, who co-stars as one of Blanchett and Fassbender’s fellow spies and dinner party guests, says working with the A-list ensemble on such high-wire scenes kept him on his toes.

“If felt like we were stepping on stage and going out there to play this incredible verbal tennis match,” Page explains. “Steven was very clear that his primary interest was in people’s reactions, in how they were being affected and manipulated by what was being said. That meant staying acutely aware of how the threat level is changing around that table.”

Soderbergh was also clear about the tone of “Black Bag,” which wasn’t something gritty and grimy and real. He was looking for sizzle.

“Spies’ lives can be isolating and lonely, and movies about them can be dour,” Fassbender says. “And Steven was like, ‘No, not this one. It’s got to be sexy. It’s got to have style.”

Beyond a get-to-know-you meal shortly before filming, Fassbender and Blanchett didn’t talk much about how they were approaching their parts or what their characters’ relationship was like before production began.

“I don’t much like having discussions,” Fassbender admits. “It doesn’t help me much. I want to see Cate’s interpretation when I get to set and what she’s throwing out there. It means I have to be listening and awake and trying to respond. I find doing that more exciting than talking about it.”

Neither actor consulted real-life spies, because the secrecy of their work means that they aren’t open to sharing office gossip with film stars. However, Blanchett read memoirs of former agents.

“I discovered that for female spies there is still kind of thoughtless misogyny within most of these agencies,” Blanchett says. “It’s infuriating because female operatives can actually garner a lot of subtle information that male operatives aren’t as attuned to getting. People open up to them more because they don’t expect women to be in the field.”

Blanchett has often been outspoken about how male-dominated and exclusionary it can be, while pushing for Hollywood to embrace more diversity both in front of and behind the camera.

In 2023, she helped launch a program supporting women, trans and nonbinary filmmakers, Proof of Concept. It was part of a wave of initiatives that took place after the #MeToo movement and then the murder of George Floyd left studios and streamers pledging to shake up their hiring practices and workplace cultures.

Since Donald Trump has been re-elected, however, vowing to end DEI programs, entertainment companies have been backing away from those promises or abandoning them entirely.

“I’m concerned about what it means for our wider everyday lives because we’re a very public-facing industry,” Blanchett says. “It sends a bad signal.”

But she also believes that studios will realize they’re making a mistake if they go back to the old way of making movies.

“If the landscapes and the sets and the writers’ rooms are homogenous, then the output will be dull, because homogeneity is the enemy of complex, exciting, dynamic art of any form,” Blanchett says.