theartsdesk Q&A: Actor Michael Fassbender

The first time I saw Michael Fassbender (b 1977) in the flesh, it was in Venice, in 2011. I was heading home on the last day of the film festival, where Steve McQueen’s Shame – starring the Irishman as a New York sex addict – had enjoyed an enthusiastically-received premiere a week before. As I jumped off a vaporetto at Marco Polo Airport, I noticed Fassbender walking in the opposite direction, towards the water. Alone, with a tuxedo slung casually over his shoulder, the actor had obviously got “the call”, to return to the festival to collect a prize.

Indeed, that night he was on stage, flashing his blazing Cheshire Cat grin, to receive the Volpi Cup for best actor. It was the first of many such prizes, for a phenomenal performance, including the recent Best British Actor award from the London Film Critics Circle. His ability to slope in undetected as he did in Venice will be put to the test sooner rather than later, for Fassbender is fast becoming the most important actor of his generation.

He leaps on any opportunity to flash that smile

The 34-year-old was born in Heidelberg, to a German father and Northern Irish mother, then raised in Killarney, Co Kerry. After studying at the Drama Centre in London (but leaving early) he spent the best part of a decade working in television, before being cast as the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in McQueen’s Hunger. As Fassbender told the London critics, “Steve is my hero. He changed my life.”

One might say that Hunger and Shame present a similar package – artful, unsentimental, thought-provoking filmmaking, at the centre of which is a performance of daring and a rather beautiful intensity. Like one of his heroes, Robert De Niro, Fassbender will embrace physical transformation to embody a character (becoming skeletal in Hunger) and like De Niro he feels no need to court the audience’s sympathies; there is a disturbing absence about Shame’s Brandon, while his portrayal of Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method doesn’t shy away from mocking his subject.

Wildly different roles in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (pictured right, Fassbender with Katie Jarvis), Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, as a younger version of Ian McKellen’s Magneto in X-Men: First Class and Rochester in Jane Eyre highlight his versatility. The only danger, at present, is over-exposure, though I suspect this thoughtful man has already calculated for that. After Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus (and who could refuse that?) he’s planning a break, before a likely reunion with McQueen.

When I met him, back in London, it was to discuss A Dangerous Method. Adapted from his play The Talking Cure by Christopher Hampton, the film charts the relationship between the young Jung and his mentor, then rival Sigmund Freud, on the eve of World War I, as well as the love affair with former patient Sabina Spielrein. One might say that Fassbender is providing the ballast, rather than the flash of the film, compared to Viggo Mortensen’s rum and ruddy-nosed Freud, and Keira Knightley’s hysterical Speilrien. But if it’s a straight turn, it’s one bristling with understated irony.

In person, Fassbender is himself an interesting mixture of seriousness and mirth. Any question about his craft is addressed with earnest precision (I can’t help feeling there’s a bit of Jung in him) and an engagement that belies the notion that actors hate to discuss their work. At the same time, he leaps on any opportunity to flash that smile and lighten up. In discussing A Dangerous Method  it was impossible not to first refer back to Shame and the echoes between the two films.

DEMETRIOS MATHEOU: What do you think Jung would have made of Brandon (pictured left)?

MICHAEL FASSBENDER: I think Freud would be more the man for him. But either would go through the history of the character and try to decipher where motivation starts. I would think that first and foremost Brandon has a problem with addiction. That’s the thing, you know, how a pattern of behaviour starts to form itself into ones life, and that pattern of behaviour is damaging to you yourself, and the relationships in your life, and your workplace. That for me would be the definition of addiction. I think there’s a very complicated character there.

What’s interesting is that both films put our relationship to sex and one another under the microscope. Jung and Brandon are men of their time, I suppose, products of their environment and the society they’re living in. But the two films are asking very similar questions.

One thing that Jung shares with Brandon is a sort of emotional constipation.

Well, yeah. When we see Jung at this point in his life he is young, ambitious and feels he has a lot to prove in his field – and that comes with a certain insecurity. I think in his later life he became much more self-assured, and more free in terms of his moral dilemmas with sexuality and extra-marital affairs. Toni Wolf was his mistress later. She was also a former patient, like Sabina, but lived in the same house as Jung and his wife. Isn’t that crazy?

How did you approach Jung? No offence, but for me you almost play him like a bank manager, or an accountant (pictured right, Fassbender with Knightley).

Yes! Seriously, something you have to take into consideration is that he’s Swiss. The Swiss embody their physicality differently than the French, the Italians, the English. He’d probably be more Germanic on the Swiss level, too, and that’s what I wanted to bring to him, a sort of Swissness which is very correct. He was a very physical man, in that he liked to take walks, and hikes in the country; he was a sailor. But everything was "just so", there’s a ritual to the way he goes about eating, and working in his office and writing letters. I wanted him to be somebody with a dynamic that was moving forward, and somebody who on the outside appeared very much in control.