The Big Picture

Rami Malek stars in new espionage thriller
The Amateur
, bringing action to a different kind of hero.
Malek’s character, Charlie Heller, transitions from CIA desk job to field work in pursuit of justice, a role he’d been interested in for some time.
Director James Hawes aims to bring Robert Littell’s novel to life with an updated story for audiences.

With all the fervor over the last-ever Mission: Impossible film dropping its first trailer, now’s a good time as any to introduce a new super-spy to the ranks: Oscar winner Rami Malek, who leads director James Hawes’ The Amateur, a new espionage thriller hitting theaters next spring. The film, which also stars Laurence Fishburne, Caitríona Balfe, and Holt McCallany, just released its first trailer, which gives fans an insight into a different kind of action hero.

Based on the novel of the same name by Robert Littell, The Amateur follows Malek’s Charlie Heller, a cryptographer for the CIA who’s seemingly got the perfect life with his wife, played by Rachel Brosnahan. But when she’s caught in the middle of what looks like a tragic bit of international terrorism, his employers refuse to take action, which motivates to go from the man in the chair to something else entirely. Blackmailing his bosses into training him for real field work, Charlie tracks down those responsible for the greatest loss of his life — and maybe the loss of his sanity, too.

Coming off the heels of a much more subdued drama with last year’s Oppenheimer, Malek gets to share scenes with some true action greats — when I sat down with he and Hawes to talk about the film, he even says that Jon Bernthal, The Punisher himself, “canceled a holiday with his family to come do us a solid,” which appears very briefly in the trailer. “I love challenges and I’m not looking to shine in a certain way above others,” he says. “I want it to be a collaboration and let them all come in and have a room full of the finest gunfighters you could have…Laurence, Jon, Rachel, Caitríona, everyone across the board.”

James Bond Inspired Malek to Join ‘The Amateur’
Image via 20th Century Studios

That’s not to discredit what he’s doing, even just in the trailer: stunt work and action sequences like he’s never been a part of before. I compared it to his villainous turn in No Time to Die, and that he gets to play the James Bond part this time, to which he reveals that the franchise film was the impetus for taking on the role of Charlie Heller:

“I said after doing that film, I thought to myself, how could I ever play a character like that? It’s probably not necessarily in the cards. You have to find an extreme underdog. Someone who is extremely underestimated, perhaps not seen, goes under the radar and is capable of doing extraordinary things. And I thought, what better way to have that resonate with audiences than to have an everyman, you might say, but someone who lies undetected because no one expects anyone from this person.
Yet he has a steely, powerful determination resolved within him that I think a lot of people will relate to. He’s obviously dealing with immense grief, but there is something of a sense of discovery that he has that allows him to find an essence of himself that perhaps he always knew existed, maybe he didn’t, but have that accentuated with a certain power that he is able to acknowledge and embody and he becomes someone else by the end of the film. But you don’t lose the Charlie, the Charlie that we relate to from the beginning by any means.”

Hawes says that the story will not entirely reflect Littell’s novel, which was originally published in 1981, but that there will be “little details” present that fans of the author’s work will appreciate: “It has been brought forward to make it feel a lot more 2025, a lot more of now. It reflects the politics [of right now], and I think just some of the things that will excite people are a lot more of the moment.”

There’s Some Similarities Between ‘The Amateur’ and ‘Oppenheimer’
Image via 20th Century Studios

The director, whose work notably includes TV titles like Doctor Who, Penny Dreadful, and Black Mirror, made his move to feature-length cinema last year with One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins, another venture into “based on a true story” tale like Oppenheimer. I noted that there might be certain similarities between adapting a novel versus adapting real events for the screen, and he agrees that the “essential process” is the same:

“You’ve got to build a world, create a cast that feels like they inhabit that space and chart the emotions of the story. I like whatever I’m doing, even if it is something that is full fiction, or even future fiction, to make it feel rooted and real. That’s where I think audiences sit comfortably, at least in what I do. There is clearly a difference if you’re doing something like
One Life
or
Oppenheimer
where… you have to respect the facts in a different way. You’ve got an important story to tell. People kind of like those strap lines at the end of the movie that says “this was true” and this person went on to do whatever. It gives you an extra punch there, but the essential process is the same. At some point you need to inhabit those characters and make them real for the screen.”

“It gives you a backbone to have done all the research so that you can bring something new and help articulate someone’s vision,” Malek says. “And it was a gift to be able to help James articulate the vision of what he saw The Amateur as and what we collectively saw Charlie should be.” He tells me that he gravitates towards characters like Charlie, who are “underestimated and unexpected and possibly heroic,” and that those themes will hopefully come through and stand the test of time, despite the gap between The Amateur’s publishing and now.

Hawes has a leg up when it comes to this though, having directed the entire first season of Slow Horses, setting it up for its current six seasons and counting of success. “It felt like a relatively natural evolution,” he says. “We wanted this to feel rooted, whereas in many ways, Slow Horses is not, because it’s got that dark humor running through it at a different level. Let’s say it’s a different kind of rooting. It’s a different kind of tone. So much of what I do as a director is about nailing the tone of a show. We wanted this to feel real, but then to elevate the experience so that an audience on a Friday or Saturday night is going to feel that it’s a real spectacle that they could be part of.”

The Amateur hits theaters on April 11, 2025. Check out the brand-new trailer below: