It’s been described as the most heartwarming spy movie ever made. TV creator Mike Schur watched it and loved it so much that he adapted it into the new hit Netflix series, A Man on the Inside. The 2020 documentary, which has a near-perfect critics’ score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, was also nominated for an Academy Award — such is the appeal of director Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent, in which a private investigator hires a delightful elderly man named Sergio to go undercover in a nursing home in El Monte, Chile, to probe first-hand a claim of mistreatment by the nursing staff.
“I knew almost nothing about [The Mole Agent], and I just fell for it so hard,” Schur told Netflix’s Tudum about the documentary, which is streaming now on Netflix. “The hero, Sergio, is so wonderfully wrought, so real, just a lovely human being. It’s a beautiful meditation on aging, a subject we are uniquely terrible at confronting, dealing with, or discussing in this country. It showed the reality of aging for people along a very broad spectrum — some folks who were doing great and some folks who were not — and that really grabbed me.”
Schur found himself profoundly touched by the documentary, in which the recently widowed Sergio answers a want ad from the private investigator as a way of processing the grief of losing his wife and trying to keep himself busy. Schur’s first instinct, however, wasn’t to adapt the movie into a comedic series. “It didn’t occur to me right away to fictionalize it or adapt it,” he adds. “Then, Morgan Sackett, who’s my producing partner, suggested we remake [it] and have Ted Danson play the main character.”
Schur and Danson, of course, last worked together on one of the best comedies of the last several years, the Emmy-nominated series The Good Place. “As soon as he said that, it became so clear that there was a way to take that story, swapping in Ted’s unique charisma for Sergio’s unique charisma. As soon as we had that idea, things happened very quickly. I started working on my idea for the adaptation, we pitched it to Ted, and he was in.”
If you’ve already started watching the Netflix series, you already kind of know how The Mole Agent unfolds. Basically, Sergio is the least promising “spy” you could think of for a job like this, but he makes up for his lack of anything resembling a spy skill with the affability of a charming grandfather. So much so, that while he’s supposed to be at the nursing home kind of snooping around and figuring out what’s what, he makes a ton of friends. He’s also crowned the kind of the nursing home during its anniversary party, and one resident even falls in love with him.
Long story short, Sergio — who keeps in touch with his “handler” via WhatsApp — might be the most boring yet likable spy in the history of espionage. To paraphrase Schur himself, it’s the kind of documentary that reminds you we’re all going to die, eventually, so live the best life you can for as long as you can. No matter who you are, no matter how old you are.
