On both the big and small screen, Rami Malek’s undeniable intensity has made for engaging and memorable performances. He has earned a reputation as a serious actor; having won an Emmy for Mr. Robot and an Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody, his dramatic chops are not in question. But could Malek also be an action star? He has flirted with the genre before, appearing in Battleship, Need for Speed, and playing a Bond villain in No Time to Die, but he has never headlined such a film — until now.

In the espionage thriller The Amateur, Malek plays Charles ‘Charlie’ Heller, a brilliant cryptographer at the CIA. When his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), is taken hostage and killed in a terror attack in London, he becomes consumed by vengeance. Charlie blackmails his superior, Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany), so he can be trained as a field agent. Charlie is mentored by Colonel Robert ‘Hendo’ Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), who doubts that he possesses the killer instinct to make him an effective operative. With the aid of a mysterious contact known only as “Inquiline”, Charlie tracks down the terrorists responsible for his wife’s death.

Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) blackmails his superior, Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany), so he can be trained as a field agent and get revenge on his wife’s killers.

The Amateur is based on Robert Littell’s novel of the same name, which was first adapted into a 1981 movie starring John Savage as Charlie. This character fits Malek’s on-screen persona well. The movie’s tagline is “Don’t underestimate him”, something Malek himself, who also co-produced the film, suggested to the marketing team. “Charlie is consistently underestimated. That’s something many of us can relate to,” he tells The New York Times.

Rather than trying to ignore how Malek doesn’t fit the traditional action hero mould, the movie leans into it. “I never thought you’d see a guy of my stature, my complexion, someone who wasn’t the obvious choice, in that position,” he tells USA Today.

As its title suggests, The Amateur is about someone learning something that doesn’t come naturally to them. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had a gun in your hand or fired a weapon, but it’s terrifying,” Malek admits to The New York Times. “It may imbue some people with a sense of power, but that’s not what it does for me.”

Sure enough, his hands seem like they belong tapping away at a keyboard rather than around the grip of a pistol. As The Amateur opens, viewers will be reminded of Malek’s iconic TV role of Elliot Alderson, the hacker with dissociative identity disorder in Mr. Robot. “If it’s a guy behind a computer screen or who feels overlooked by society or who’s disenfranchised and alienated, those characters just speak to me. I find them profoundly human,” Malek says. Part of the thrill of The Amateur is watching one such character emerge from the shadows to mete out justice.

Laurence Fishburne plays a supporting part as Robert Henderson, Charlie’s mentor.

Malek is front and centre of the action, but he has Laurence Fishburne’s Hendo giving dependable support in the mentor role — an archetype the veteran actor has settled into comfortably over the last decade of his career. In one scene, Hendo slaps Charlie twice — something Fishburne improvised. “[Hendo] pushes [Charlie] and challenges him on his intention,” Fishburne tells Entertainment Weekly about the scene. Hendo can tell Charlie is not cut out to be a killer and wants to dissuade him from going down a path he will regret taking.

Director James Hawes says Malek got slapped “a lot”, because the subsequent takes had to match the first take in which Fishburne improvised the slaps. “He got slapped, but then it gets to the point where Rami says, ‘Yeah, keep going, dude, keep going.’ Obviously, you can’t not do it on the reverse shot,” Hawes explains.

The Amateur is smart about how it employs its star, presenting audiences with a character in line with Malek’s established on-screen persona while also showing us shades of the actor we haven’t seen before.