THE SPY WHO CAME FROM THE CODE

As Oscar winner Rami Malek plays a cryptologist who uses cutting-edge tech to track his wife's killers in new spook thriller The Amateur, he reveals his fondness for oddballs, St Pancras and his movie co-star Rachel Brosnahan

- By Gabrielle Donnelly

THROUGHOUT his two-decade career, Rami Malek has been drawn to playing characters who were at odds with society. “I gravitate towards them,” he shrugs when we meet to discuss his new film, the edge-of-your-seat spy thriller The Amateur, opening in cinemas this weekend. “Characters who are on that fragile intersection between feeling broken and yet being brilliant at the same time. Those are the people who are very interesting to me.”

His latest outsider is the protagonist of The Amateur, Charlie Heller a nerdy decoder working in the basement of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Intellectually brilliant, but physically unremarkable, he is also emotionally shy and retiring.

But when Heller's life is torn apart by terrorists who murder his beloved wife Sarah, a committed climate change activist attending a conference in London, he goes underground on a worldwide hunt to find and bring to justice her killers, using, not brute force, but the more unusual weapons of his razor-sharp intelligence and up-to-the-minute technical skills.

It's an old-fashioned, action-packed spy thriller but one with a difference. As one character in the film frankly tells Charlie: “You're not a killer. You're just a slight little nerdy fellow who likes to work on computers.” Or, as Rami himself has said of his own character: “He's not a typical CIA agent; he's not an action hero. He's The Amateur!”

The Bohemian Rhapsody star, who won an Oscar for his potrayal of Freddie Mercury, agrees that in many ways, his introverted computer nerd Charlie harks back to the TV role that brought him to fame in the first place Elliot Alderson, the anxiety-riddled cybersecurity engineer recruited into a mysterious electronic activists' group in the 2015-2019 television series Mr Robot.