20th Century Studios just released the official trailer for their new unconventional spy movie The Amateur and we literally can’t wait to watch this film.
Source: Courtesy / 20th Century Studios
The movie follows Charlie, a CIA cryptographer whose world is turned upside down when his wife is murdered by a group of terrorists. Bent on seeking justice, Charlie will stop at nothing — including blackmailing the agency — to do just that.
The film also stars Rachel Brosnahan, Caitríona Balfe, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson, Adrian Martinez, Danny Sapani, and Laurence Fishburne. “The Amateur” is directed by James Hawes. The screenplay is by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli based on the novel by Robert Littell.
GlobalGrind Sr. Content Director Janeé Bolden spoke with Rami Malek and The Amateur director James Hawes ahead of the trailer release about working together, what makes Charlie unique and putting a fresh twist on the spy genre.
Source: Courtesy / 20th Century Studios
“It’s been a proper collaboration,” Hawes told Global Grind about working with Malek. “I think that the useful thing is we came to it with exactly the same feeling for the character at the heart of it and how to make him honest and loved and admired. Not to say we didn’t have our debates and our arguments about it, but that’s part of the process, part of what I like to call the creative friction, along the way. And that was important. A director’s job, every scene you go into is to help make that moment in the story feel real. And you do that with an actor and their instincts, with the designer and the space you. You arrive at. And I think we work pretty well at working that process through.”
“Are you saying that my instincts felt fraudulent to you?” Malek joked. “I think we come from a place of wanting it to feel as real as possible because, let’s face it, you know, we’re hit with these, you know, certain type of films in these genre, in this genre that we love and we keep coming back to, you know, for the seventh or eighth version, there’s something that obviously works. We did stress test, every scene, every thought, every character choice as much as possible. Because we wanted to make this genre, feel as alive, real nuanced and relatable as it possibly could. And for, you know, for someone who works at the CIA but obviously doesn’t do the job that the usual suspects do, it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge to make it believable. But if it forces you into a place of, coming up with extraordinary, ideas that come from Charlie’s mind, ingenuity, you know, using. Using that brilliance in a different way that is essentially his weapon. You know, his. His mind and his ability to think on the move and having the IQ he does and the strength that comes out of such grief and loss as he faces all those things, galvanized to give him a certain artillery.”
Even in the trailer we can see that Charlie’s peers question his physical capabilities, but Malek says the role helped him realize that even beyond the film, ordinary people are capable of the extraordinary.
“I keep hitting this note of someone who’s underestimated and I think I immediately resonated with this film, you know, even from an early screening,” Malek said. “This underlying sense of questioning our self worth and that being dictated by others and feeling a sense of feeling compromised. You’re feeling small, feeling incapable of doing the things that people usually equate with heroism. And that exists in all of us. So you know, James and I just tried to discover those elements from the place of a common human being and realized that there is no such thing as a common person. You know, we’re all capable of the extraordinary, whether, whether we’re forced to be or whether we just exist, in our own right. We’re all capable of something unique, special and sometimes powerful and explosive.”
Source: Courtesy / 20th Century Studios
“It’s that sense of when there’s an injustice, when there is some sense of either an individual or an organization that is denying you fairness,” Hawes added. “And we’re used to being that underdog. I mean honestly, it can be your Internet server, it can be the school board, it can be. That just makes you mad and you can’t win that battle. And in a much bigger way, who is winning that battle?”
The Amateur is only Hawes’ second feature film, but he previously directed the feature length finales of the 2016 and 2018 seasons of Black Mirror, ‘Hated In The Nation’ and ‘Smithereens’. He also directed and setup the entire first season of the hit AppleTV+ series Slow Horses. Meanwhile, Malek was terrifying in the James Bond blockbuster No Time To Die and won an Emmy for his work in Mr. Robot, so neither Hawes nor Malek is an amateur when it comes to espionage thrillers.
“For me it’s a genre I love and I’ve done even sort of fact based things that have been thriller-ish that have played in this area,” Hawes explained. “So I guess because I love watching them, I want to experiment with how you can push that genre in a different way. This just felt like a fresh take because of the character, because of his invention, because of his intellect, that you could take to a place that we haven’t quite seen before. Of course, there are some familiarities. We’re not pretending we’ve reinvented the wheel, but then that also is part of what you want. You know, you want the same menu, the same sort of courses. we’ve just got different sprinkles.”
Source: Courtesy / 20th Century Studios
From the trailer The Amateur seems to be about revenge, but both Hawes and Malek are insistent that it’s actually less about the getback than setting things right in the world.
“We can talk about vengeance, we should also talk about justice,” Hawes told Global Grind. “Rami and I talked about those two things for Charlie, remembering that he starts off at the beginning, going to his bosses and expecting that the institution, the organization, will sort this out and, and bring the people responsible to account. And then when he realizes that they’re not going to do that, he decides to go on his own mission. And as his grief develops, as his anger boils, it does start to color with elements that look like revenge. And there is a brutality and, even sometimes an ugliness about how he’s behaving. In the end, what he’s seeking is justice for Sarah. To say that Sarah mattered, a line from the movie, to feel that nobody gets away with what they’ve done.”
“And beyond that, if it can happen to her, who else is it happening to?” Malek added. “On a larger scale, he makes certain discoveries that, sadly, the death of his soulmate allow him to expose. And in a way, you can look at the loss of this prolific love as a means for him to take on, speak truth to power and, in a way that he never could, expose truth. Expose truth in a way that you can’t turn away from it. I don’t know what’s stronger than that. You can point a gun at someone’s head, or you can tell them the absolute truth that they’re disguising. And I wonder if you measured those what would be stronger.”
The Amateur arrives in theaters nationwide April 11, 2025.
