A revenge thriller with unexpected twists and turns
Rami Malek, who won an Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, seems an unlikely pick to become the next Jason Bourne, but in the Athriller The Amateur, directed by James Hawes (Slow Horses), he’s more than that: he’s the producer as well as the star. After winning an Oscar and playing a Bond villain, it must be refreshing to play an introverted character that people underestimate, somewhat like his Elliot character in breakout role Mr. Robot. Same, but different.
Malek plays vengeance-seeking CIA decoder Charlier Heller, slowly walking away from an explosion about to happen, somewhat like every “hero walks away from fireball” trailer we’ve seen in action movie history—until it finally does go off, and he cringes from the boom-boom and darts out of frame.
“I won’t say this is an iteration (of the Mr. Robot character), but there are similarities,” he says in a Zoom call. “I gravitate to those characters who are at the fragile intersections of feeling broken, maybe brilliant at the same time, and going through some sort of grief and persevering.”
Grief is the underlying motif for Charlie after losing his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) in a London hostage taking that plays out on CCTV cameras. Charlie, a whiz at algorithms, reconstructs the masked faces that held his wife at gunpoint on camera. He wants revenge. The CIA wants him to back off.
Enter retired US colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), assigned to train Charlie in guns (not too successful) and improvised explosives (much better).
Henderson, like many mentors Fishburne has played (see: Morpheus in The Matrix), exudes a calm, deeper knowledge of the world: he warns Charlie about the price of vengeance.
To its credit, The Amateur (based on a 1981 Cold War novel by James Littell) is not simple cat and mouse, but cat and mouse squared: loyalties and motivations are constantly challenged. “Every one of these characters has an arc,” says Fishburne in the Zoom event. “I think we, as actors, find it really attractive is to tell the stories of seemingly ordinary people who have to rise to extraordinary circumstances, like all human beings have to do in life.”
As Sarah, Brosnahan (Midge in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and soon in Superman) essentially plays a ghost, turning up in Charlie’s memories, offering comfort and support. But she’s the heart driving the movie. “Because of these different relationships that you get to visit for brief periods throughout the film, it feels grounded in its humanity,” she says. “And so it makes Charlie a character that you want to root for, and also one you can see yourself in.”
Catriona Balfe, known to Outlander fans as Claire, set aside her colonial attire to play Inquiline, an anonymous hacker who helps Charlie connect some dots. She’s also experienced loss. “Inquiline has this beautiful dichotomy of somebody who’s retreated from the world and sort of lives in the shadows, yet was also doing this incredibly heroic thing, which was exposing corruption and speaking truth to power.”
Balfe also appreciates that this is not a typical revenge flick. “I think it’s such a great question they ask in this film: is revenge the right way, or is justice the thing that’s ultimately going to give you some solace? And it’s Heller’s journey through that discovery that’s really interesting.”
Hawes directs with the same sense of irony as Slow Horses, which is also about characters who are lost, left behind, or set aside. Set in London, but with an international flair that shifts from Langley, Virginia to Istanbul to Marseille to Romania, The Amateur has a Cold War feel, but it also questions what, and whom, we should believe.
“I’m never going to be a coder,” says Malek. “I realized on Mr. Robot, I’d learned enough. But I did begin to get quite paranoid as to what the government was able to access after the Patriot Act, and watching that Laura Poitras documentary, Citizen Four, about Snowden. It was terrifying. What Charlie Heller is capable of, what he’s tasked with containing within himself, it’s a superpower in its own right, having to contain an immeasurable amount of knowledge about certain acts going on in the world. That’s enough to occupy my mind.”
Being a producer was a step deeper into the storytelling process. “I just love to see things from beginning to end all the way through. I hope it’s not the perfectionist aspect, but I found myself, on Bohemian and Bond, remembering certain cameras, certain lenses, talking to the directors in post and wanting to make sure we were getting the best of the best. And I’d hear about a lot of actors who come in into the editing suite, and I thought, how could I do that without having to do it in kind of this sneaky manner, without being an intruder? And the way to do that was to start from the iteration,” gathering the best director, writers, and a “dream cast.”
All agreed it was a dream shoot, and that this story could use a sequel—or maybe a prequel. “I want to see Charlie’s love story with Sarah,” says Fishburne. “How did they meet? Where’s our rom-com?”
