What's a nice boy like Michael Fassbender doing in a film like Shame?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/06/michael-fassbender-shame-mcqueen

What's a nice boy like Michael Fassbender doing in a film like Shame?

At 12 he was an altar boy. Now Michael Fassbender is having sex with strangers and spanking Keira Knightley in two Oscar-tipped performances. Is it time he put his clothes back on?


Emma Brockes
Emma Brockes
guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 January 2012 18.00 EST
Article history

When Michael Fassbender's new film Shame, directed by Steve McQueen, previewed in Venice last year, a small part of him was relieved his mother couldn't make it. The film, about a New York-based sex addict, is, depending on your point of view, a brilliant exposition of loneliness in the city or a pretentious piece of navel-gazing, but either way includes a lot of very slappy sex scenes and clenched-arse shots. "My mum was supposed to be there," Fassbender says. "And in a way, thank God, her back played up. Maybe in her subconscious she developed a back pain on the eve of the screening." Even without her, when the lights came up Fassbender was, "a little bit shell-shocked. Everyone in that movie theatre had seen me in some pretty uncomfortable… ahem, wait a minute! Let me get my clothes back on here."

Shame
Production year: 2011
Countries: UK, USA
Cert (UK): 18
Runtime: 99 mins
Directors: Steve McQueen
Cast: Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, Michael Fassbender
More on this film

This is Fassbender's moment. After years of playing relatively minor roles he has, in quick succession, starred in Jane Eyre, A Dangerous Method, X-Men, Haywire and Shame, and as most women who have seen these films know, he is, at 34, in his leading-man prime: blue-grey eyes, long black lashes, a habit of ducking his chin in a way that acknowledges both how pretty he is and how vaguely embarrassing he finds it, plus there's the Irish accent and then the hair, which comes up off his forehead in waves of auburn.

In a London hotel room, he has the conscientious air of someone sitting an exam, eyes glazed to the middle-distance, frowning slightly. I've heard he is, or at least was, a big party boy, but his aspect this morning is pure butter-wouldn't-melt.

His parentage is half-German, half-Irish, and he grew up in Killarney, where his family ran a restaurant. The film that brought him to prominence was McQueen's brilliant first feature, Hunger, a biopic of the Republican hunger strikers in which Fassbender played Bobby Sands. It foreshadowed Shame in that there was little dialogue and relied on the actor's ability to communicate physically – his deadpan expression transmitting a kind of transcendent disappointment – and like the later film was gruelling to shoot. (Fassbender went on an extreme, 600-calorie-a-day diet to drop the necessary weight).

Getting cast in Hunger, he says, was the single greatest stroke of luck of his career, at a time when he was "a 30-year-old unknown male" and it seemed possible that large-scale success would bypass him. "The recession was right around the corner, this industry was going to suffer as much as any other, and just the fact that there were less jobs for less actors; so God, I was so lucky that that happened when it did. Would Hunger have been made the next year? I don't think so." Instead, he came to the attention of Hollywood casting agents and now has a sense of being "at the highest point I could ever have imagined arriving at, when I started out at 17".

Fassbender's air of surprise at this, his expectations exceeded, makes him likable in a way that seeps into his roles. In Shame, he plays an executive, externally plausible, highly successful, but who is unable for reasons never fully explained to have a real relationship, as opposed to encounters with strangers, prostitutes and porn. His sister, played by Carey Mulligan, throws herself at any passing male as a kind of mirror pathology. It is beautifully shot, a commentary as much on the city that enables them both as on the characters themselves, and the scarcity of dialogue makes it an acting job of real delicacy.

At first, Fassbender tried to do research into sex addiction in Britain, but couldn't find enough people willing to talk about it, so transferred to New York. The addiction is, in a way, just a metaphor – "Scratch the surface of what's socially normal. I suppose in some way all of us have something we display to the public and things we feel too ashamed of or uncomfortable with to reveal to other people" – but one that required a lot of courage in the performers. Mulligan was, he says, "brave and willing to throw herself into it. There's no safety net, and that makes it exciting and scary; [it] requires the actors to trust each other and test each other and surprise each other." Fassbender is not, he says, "very exhibitionist" when it comes to taking off his clothes. "I was self-conscious, for sure, but it was something I had to get over very quickly. Those scenes are really where you get an insight into the guy's psyche. When you see him naked, it's in more ways than one. I had to be on the ball and not thinking about those things. And you try to make sure that your partner in the scene is comfortable. I'd say, 'Let's go for it now and it'll be over soon.' It sounds terrible, like a really bad chat-up line." He laughs. "Quite threatening, actually."

What was McQueen's advice?

"He'd say, 'Surprise me'."

In a weird coincidence, the film Fassbender made before Shame was David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, in which he plays Carl Jung, with Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Keira Knightley as Jung's mistress, Sabina. The storyline explores Jung's pioneering treatment of sexual dysfunction. But no, he says, there were no particular insights to carry over: "It's funny – once I finish one thing, I dispose of it fairly quickly and then you're getting stuck into the next one."

It is too good, given all of these studies in repression, that Fassbender was head altar boy as a child, which he thinks of with a wry nod as his first starring role. He would rotate responsibilities with three other boys, an extraordinary duty he thinks, looking back, and not one he always fulfilled. "I had the keys to the church and had to open it in the morning, and attend all the masses and weddings and funerals and whatever it entailed for that month. And lock the church at night. That's quite a lot to do at 12. And I remember –" he starts to giggle – "a couple of times I slept in. And the whole congregation was waiting outside the church. And we had these American priests who'd come to visit, and I'd be running across the fields with the keys. It was so crazy to think it was in my hands. But that was my first experience in a way of being on stage, before an audience, of sorts."

His experience of the Catholic church generally was benign thanks to his local priest, Father Galvin, who was, he says, "very cool. It's not all bad and abuse of boys. A lot of people relied on him. He would be there to listen. Obviously the idea of hell and suffering is kind of heavy-duty, but there was a lot of positivity."

Fassbender had the advantage, perhaps, of seeing his home from a slight angle thanks to his father's foreignness – his mother is Irish, his father German. There were no other Fassbenders in his class at school ("In amongst the Fitzgeralds and the O'Sullivans – the O'Fassbenders?!"), although it was a cosmopolitan enclave; there were other German and Dutch families in the neighbourhood. Fassbender's CV has it that he's fluent in German – he spent summer holidays there – but he's pretty rusty now, he says. The most fluent he became was when his dad bought satellite telly and they watched a lot of German TV.

When he was 16, his parents allowed him to move into rooms above the restaurant in town and live a relatively independent existence in return for doing weekend shifts downstairs. It was an arduous life; his parents worked six days a week when he was growing up and he was expected to work, too. But Fassbender appreciated the exchange and had the sense to see what a good deal he was getting. "It was very cool. I didn't take the piss; I respected the fact that they were letting me live like that. So it was a fair trade-off. And I've always been more inclined to go out to work than carry on with academic studies." His sister, a neuropsychologist – "Or neuroscientist, I'm not sure" – is "very brainy", and he bursts out laughing. "She was opposite to me, she loved reading. Always asking questions. Signs of intelligence at a young age. I was much more interested in my imaginative world. And building things and being more physical."

The idea to act came from a workshop he did at school run by a local actor who, when he started the group up again in town, invited Fassbender to join. "And I thought this feels right and if I worked at it maybe I could make a career out of it."

It would be a long time before he got anywhere, however. Fassbender went to London and enrolled at drama school, which didn't appeal to him. He is an intuitive performer, and resented the drills they were put through. "We did a lot of that in drama school: intellectualising and maybe justifying your position. 'I am a thinking actor and I have thought this through' – well, just do it. I much prefer the doing aspect. 'Just do it' – one of the best slogans ever."

He lucked out in his first role, getting cast in Steven Spielberg's Band Of Brothers. He was 24 and sure he was about to hit the big time. Older friends urged caution, one in particular – "I worked behind a bar for him, and I went back to working behind the bar, and he said to me, 'I believe in you but I reckon it's going to take another six or seven years.' He was right. And it was a good lesson for me: what it was like to not get to do the job you love doing and be forced to do other things – it's more precious to you when you do get an opportunity to do it. It made me not take things for granted. Not to say that I've matured all that much in 10 years, but a lot of things that go along with the business would have seduced me more 10 years ago. I'm pretty happy. I mean, Jesus…"

He is keen at this stage to say yes to as many different genres as possible. Haywire, a Steven Soderbergh film, is a sort of sub-James Bond caper with Ewan McGregor in the lead and in which Fassbender plays a minor role, notable for the fact he gets beaten to death in a hotel room by a woman (Gina Carano). Soderbergh asked in advance if he was OK with this, both in terms of his ego and also the fact that he has to fight back and be seen punching a woman in the face. He was fine with it, he says, not least because Carano turned out to be twice the man Fassbender is. "She beat the s$#! out of me anyway. There were no body doubles and Gina was like, 'Drive me into the television harder.' I was like, 'You know, we're acting here, Gina, we're not in the ring. Let's establish that before it's your turn to start hitting me.' "

Apart from Hunger, by far the best of his recent films has been Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold's feature about a girl on a sink estate in east London and her relationship with her mother's amoral boyfriend. It was a shockingly good film and you wondered whether Fassbender, playing a cynical, exploitative and by turns generous man, felt disgusting at the end of the day. "It washes away. I think it's important to go to places that are uncomfortable. For the benefit of others, maybe. You're facing all these ugly things, and knowing well this is an ugly thing and it's there somewhere in all of us. And so you're representing the ugliness."

He starts laughing again because, of course, taking that kind of risk with ugliness is probably something only the very beautiful can do. "Conor does cross the line in Fish Tank, but on the flipside he is the catalyst for [the heroine] to become her own person. He is the only one who inspires her with confidence to follow her dreams. And that she's not destined for s$#!. And so it's again playing with that ambiguity."

He lives in Hackney. (He was on holiday in Europe when the riots happened, turned on the TV and was like, "Oh, that's my flat. Fire everywhere. There was no damage, luckily. Shocking.") When he's touring, he'll go into a church to light a candle, but he drifted from Catholicism years ago – "Too many contradictions" – although he was horrified when a German priest told him off recently for wandering into his church wearing a hat. "And of course in Germany, they let you know. My grandfather would be very cross – he believed you entered any building at all, you take your hat off."

There are more films on the way: a lead in Ridley Scott's Prometheus and a third film with McQueen in development. It is the kind of professional relationship with a director that Fassbender could only have dreamed of, one he hopes will be career-long. McQueen has informed and amplified his basic philosophy, what he tells himself every time he walks on set.

"The problem is, we feel a lot of pressure about looking silly or appearing weak, whatever that means, or being a failure. You have to keep in your head: what's the worst that can happen? I'm trying to tell a story – what's the worst that can happen? You fall flat on your face, then hopefully you get back up again and go for it again and try something else. We're all going to die one day. I'm stealing that off Steve; it's what he'd say when he ordered me to take my clothes off. 'WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE ONE DAY!'"

With that in mind he asks if there's time for a cigarette before his next appointment. Yes, says the PR. "Woo!" says Fassbender and, grinning, bounces out of the room.