The Agency (2024–) is an American espionage thriller series developed by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth, based on the French series “Le Bureau des Légendes”. Michael Fassbender stars as Martian, a covert CIA officer who is ordered to abandon his undercover life and return to London Station. His return becomes complicated when Samia, the woman he left behind, reappears and pulls him back toward the identity and emotional life he was supposed to erase. The series also stars Jeffrey Wright as Henry Ogletree, Richard Gere as Bosko, Jodie Turner-Smith as Samia Zahir, Katherine Waterston as Naomi, John Magaro as Owen and Alex Reznik as Coyote. Rather than presenting espionage as glamorous adventure, The Agency focuses on psychological pressure, surveillance, false identity, loyalty and the personal damage caused by long-term undercover work.
The Agency is set around the CIA’s London Station, but the series was filmed across several countries, with England, Estonia and Egypt forming the main production base. London provides the central setting, with the city’s glass offices, embassies, brutalist housing, streets and institutional interiors creating the cold, controlled world of Western intelligence. The U.S. Embassy at Nine Elms appears in the London Station material, while the Barbican Estate is strongly associated with Martian’s London apartment environment. Much of the controlled interior work was filmed at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden near Watford, where major sets were built for the Agency headquarters, apartment interiors, hospital spaces and other operational locations. Tallinn in Estonia was used for parts of the series’ Eastern European storyline, with locations such as Laagna Tee helping to stand in for Minsk and the world around the deep-cover agent Coyote. Cairo in Egypt was also used for international material, giving the series a denser and more chaotic urban texture outside the London intelligence world. The result is a spy series with a deliberately international location identity: London supplies the polished centre of power, studio sets create the hidden machinery of the Agency, while Tallinn and Cairo expand the story into contested spaces of fieldwork, danger and divided loyalties.
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