Michael Fᴀssbender details the most challenging scene for him to film in his new movie. The X-Men actor, best known for playing Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto, in 20th Century Fox’s X-Men saga, has a diverse career outside of superhero movies. He portrayed Bobby Sands in the historical drama Hunger, and has starred in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. In the comedy space, Fᴀssbender left a memorable performance as a coach of the American Samoa soccer team in Next Goal Wins.

In recent years, Fᴀssbender has been deep in the thriller/spy genre. Following his journey portraying an ᴀssᴀssin in David Fincher’s 2023 film The Killer, the actor starred in the 2024 Paramount+/Showtime spy series The Agency, where he plays the covert CIA agent Martian, who struggles to cut ties with an old flame after his mission has come to an end. Fᴀssbender’s new 2025 film further sees him in a muddy situation between heart and duty.

Michael Fᴀssbender Reveals Why He Panicked During The Polygraph Scene In Black Bag

Fᴀssbender’s Character Tasked With Interviewing His Colleagues

Directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by David Koepp, the tense spy drama Black Bag centers around a British intelligence agent, George Woodhouse (Fᴀssbender), whose skill at sniffing out liars is put to the test to find out whether his spouse, Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) has betrayed her country and marriage. After arriving in theaters on March 14, the critically acclaimed movie is currently Fᴀssbender’s highest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Fᴀssbender details the intense polygraph scene that was a challenge to film. The star explains that he learned the scene the way Koepp wrote it, which is what happens in the film as George interrogates all of his colleagues. However, on the day of filming the sequence, Soderbergh wanted to capture all the characters’ individual coverage at once. Check out what Fᴀssbender said below:

That was definitely the most challenging scene for me because in the script, it jumps between the characters as it’s written dialogue-wise. So that’s the way I learned it. But then on the day Steven was like, “You’re just going to do all of Clarissa’s dialogue in one, and you’re going to do all of Stokes and all of Freddie.” I hadn’t learned it that way, and I’m asking quite similar questions to each of the characters. But there’s subtle differences there. I was panicking. I had the pages all over the place in front of me.

It didn’t matter because the camera’s hardly on me anyway. I wish he’d told me that, but yeah, I was panicking a little bit that day.

Soderbergh explains that his method of filming worked in terms of efficiency, stressing that the polygraph method is actually being used by intelligence agencies. He further explains that the scene is based on real-life polygraph processes, which he happens to have insider knowledge of. Check out his comment below:

It makes perfect sense if you’re on a normal movie to memorize the script as written.

It just turned out in order to do this most efficiently, everybody had to be sH๏τ from these four different angles. I would set up two of them at a time and just rotate them in and out. And as soon as I explained that to Michael, he went, ‘Oh s—.’ He had to scramble his brain and get that sorted out. The intelligence agencies still use it a lot. The metrics they’re using are pretty precise. We had a guy who does this for those kinds of agencies, and he felt very, very confident in his ability to judge whether somebody is lying. He’s like, “Look, can it be beaten? Yes, but I can tell you it’s really f—ing hard.” You’ve got to be a sort of sociopath to really fool it because they’re collecting all this data — there’s a hand thing, heart rate, blood pressure, pupil dilation, it’s full on.

I sH๏τ all them out first, and then I came and sH๏τ Michael, and then, he got to do the version of it that he had memorized. So it all worked out, but there was a little minute of, “Wait, what are you doing?”

Our Take On Black Bag And The Polygraph Scene

Black Bag Might Be More Realistic Than Fans Would Think

Though Black Bag isn’t based on any real-life events, Koepp, who also penned the script for the original Mission: Impossible movie, has extensive knowledge of real-world intelligence. The screenwriter has previously opened up about interviewing intelligence operatives for realistic portrayals of related scenes in movies. Soderbergh’s comments add another layer of realism to Black Bag‘s world-building.

Instead of blindly following traditional spy tropes, the highly rated Black Bag delves into intricate and complicated relationships and explores the nature of trust. The polygraph scene is one of the instances where George has to question those around him. For the most part, Fᴀssbender isn’t shown within the polygraph scene. He acts as the operator who asks questions, and as the character taking the test changes, his voice is the only constant, remaining detached and emotionless. It makes sense that the actor panicked during filming when the plan was changed at the last minute. However, his performance is still excellent.

Source: EW