Michael Fassbender: 'You've got to ignite your inner 10-year-old'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/26/michael-fassbender-x-men-first-class?CMP=twt_fd

He is about to hit our screens in the latest X-Men movie, not to mention a host of others. Michael Fassbender will probably never be this unfamous again

Steve Rose
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 May 2011 21.30 BST

Michael Fassbender
Michael Fassbender in X-Men: First Class

This guy doesn't really know how to harness his powers to their full extent; he hasn't really got to grips with it. He's yet to unleash his full potential." Michael Fassbender is talking about his character in the latest X-Men movie, the metal-manipulating comic book mutant Magneto, but you could easily use the same words to describe the actor himself. Top directors are drawn like iron filings by his magnetism: David Cronenberg, Steven Soderbergh, Jim Jarmusch, Ridley Scott, Danny Boyle – he's worked with them all. He's been called "the next Brando", "the next Daniel Day-Lewis", "the next Bond". And he's switched comfortably between arthouse intensity (Hunger, Fish Tank), self-aware comedy (Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds) and macho action (300, Centurion). Added to which, he's devilishly handsome and casually personable in a way that tends to melt reporters – Vogue's profile of him earlier this year ended up as almost a marriage proposal. In short, you could forgive him for having a bit of a superhero complex.

X-Men: First Class
Production year: 2011
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 131 mins
Directors: Matthew Vaughn
Cast: James McAvoy, January Jones, Jason Flemyng, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Rose Byrne
More on this film

He looks every bit the pin-up today: jeans, white T-shirt, black aviator jacket, cigarette constantly on the go, floppy 40s-style blond hair – think James Dean meets Biggles. Having spent much of last year shooting X-Men: First Class at Pinewood Studios, he's now there again, working on another blockbuster for next summer, Scott's sci-fi epic Prometheus. That explains the blond hair. You could say he's unleashing his full potential, or, perhaps, going mainstream.

"Being very crude about the whole thing, I wanted to do a studio film," he says. "It was coming to a point in my career where it was possible, and it was then just about finding the right one. I've been around for a while and I've had to graft to get to the position I'm in, and I wouldn't change a bit of that. If it's a success, then it allots me more power, which allows me to control my own career more."

Since it's a prequel, fans know much of what happens in X-Men: First Class, which is directed by Matthew "Kick Ass" Vaughn. It covers the genesis of the superhero troupe, and the formative friendship and subsequent falling out between Magneto and the X-Men's founder, Charles Xavier, played by James McAvoy. As you'd expect, McAvoy and Fassbender do much of the dramatic heavy lifting in what's often a riot of special effects, Bond-style sets and mutants with strange powers. Fassbender does some literal heavy lifting, too, using his magnetic control to raise submarines out of the ocean and tilt distant satellite dishes. It says something about Fassbender that you buy it, even though in reality, all he's doing is waving his hands like a magician and screwing his face into a constipated grimace.

"I know," he laughs, "I was thinking about the hand movements: should everything be done more with the eyes than the hands? But once you decided to go down that route, you've got to fully commit to it. If you don't then you're really going to have egg on your face. It's like wearing a helmet and a cape – I'm a grown man, for God's sake! But once you do it, you've got to ignite that inner 10-year-old and just enjoy it." Instead of trying to channel Ian McKellen, who played the older Magneto in the previous three X-Men movies, Fassbender drew on the nearly 50 years' worth of X-Men comic book material. He never read comics as a child, he says. "I did have a Superman outfit, though. I used to play this game with my cousin where he would dress up in civilian clothes – like Clark Kent – and he would stand by the side of the road and when a car came he would run behind a bush and I would come out from the bush dressed as Superman."

Despite the silliness, X-Men has always had more of a serious core to it than most comic books, with its long-running themes of "them" (humans) and "us" (mutants), it's routinely dealt with issues of prejudice, alienation and minority rights – all of which are accentuated by the new movie's 1960s civil rights movement-era setting. Magneto and Xavier are respectively the Malcolm X and Martin Luther King of mutant integration. "It's a very intelligent basis for a comic book," says Fassbender, "when certain groups of people feel like they've been ostracised – whether it's down to ethnicity or religious belief or sexual orientation. As human beings, for some reason we've never been able to escape that feeling of tribalism."

Fassbender knows about not fitting in. The son of a German father and an Irish mother, he moved from Heidelberg to Killarney as a two-year-old. His surname marked him out, he says. "Well, you've got the O'Sullivans, the Fitzgeralds, the McCarthys and … the Fassbenders. In those very early years I did want to go back to Germany. My parents encouraged us to speak German at home but I always felt very self-conscious about it. For some reason I always felt embarrassed reading out loud as well."

It took a while for him find his acting stride, too. After quitting drama school in London, he landed a decent role in Steven Spielberg's wartime mini-series Band of Brothers when he was 23, but that was followed by "lean years" of TV bit parts and small film roles until Steve McQueen cast him as Bobby Sands in Hunger. McQueen wasn't quite the Professor X who honed Fassbender's superpowers, but something close. The actor's physical commitment to the role was arresting enough (he lost 14 kilos to play the imprisoned IRA man), but what sealed his reputation was the film's sole scene of dialogue, between Fassbender and Liam Cunningham's priest. For 20 minutes, in a virtually uninterrupted take with a fixed camera, the pair bond and joust and plead over Sands's planned hunger strike across a table. It's audacious and electric and indelible, and it clearly made the right impression on other film-makers.

"Steve gives very strange notes," says Fassbender. "He'd say to Liam and me, 'You're like George Foreman and you're like Muhammad Ali.' Then after four takes he'd say to me, 'All right, now it's getting a bit like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. I want you to behave a little bit more like God in this scene.' Liam and I looked each other, and neither of us had a clue what he was talking about. And then it was amazing, and this sounds so naff but it's true, we were doing the scene and five minutes into it, I looked at Liam and I just saw it in his eye, we both sort of …" He snaps his fingers. "I always think a good director has to be a fantastic manipulator."

Fassbender has finished shooting a new film with McQueen called Shame. It's a story examining sexual addiction and the idea of immediate gratification, he explains. Judging by the leaked images on the internet – of Fassbender and a naked woman having sex against a full-height window overlooking a New York street – it's another physical role. "It's gonna make some noise," he says, with a wolfish grin. "In some ways it was harder than Hunger. When you're working with Steve, anything he brings to the table is going to be uncompromising and uncomfortable, and it's gonna challenge an audience to a level that most people don't have the confidence or ability to do. Steve McQueen and shocking go hand in hand."

So Fassbender hasn't gone totally mainstream, but after the aforementioned queue of movies (he's also Rochester to Mia Wasikowska's Jane Eyre in a few months – the next Colin Firth?), he'll probably never be this unfamous again. Already his relationship with X-Men co-star Zoë Kravitz (yes, daughter of Lenny) is making him a gossip-mag target. "I don't think about it too much," he says. "I still go about doing my everyday things like I did 10 years ago. I don't want to change that. My private life is private. If I do a film, how can I expect the audience to follow me if they're thinking, 'He goes out with this person,' and 'He has this for breakfast'? It's a disadvantage." He might be able to lift submarines, but celebrity may be harder to control. For the moment, though, he seems to be enjoying every minute. "It's a privileged position to be in," he says. "It's not like I'm digging a ditch."

X-Men: First Class is released on 1 June.

http://www.musicrooms.net/showbiz/34164-michael-fassbender-childhood-helped-with-x-men.html

Michael Fassbender: Childhood helped with X:Men
By Cover on 27/05/2011

Michael Fassbender channeled his “inner ten-year-old” in order to realistically shoot special effects sequences in X-Men: First Class.

The German-Irish actor is starring as a young Magneto in the upcoming superhero film, which is the fifth installment of the X-Men film series and a prequel to X-Men.

Michael stars as the leader and founder of the Brotherhood of Mutants in the movie – based on the Marvel comics - and his role requires a lot of heavy lifting which is enhanced by CGI.

The 34-year-old star had to retreat to his childhood in order to realistically enact the dramatic scenes.

"I know. I was thinking about the hand movements: should everything be done more with the eyes than the hands? But once you decided to go down that route, you've got to fully commit to it. If you don't then you're really going to have egg on your face. It's like wearing a helmet and a cape – I'm a grown man, for God's sake!” he said in an in interview with British newspaper The Guardian. “But once you do it, you've got to ignite that inner ten-year-old and just enjoy it."

Michael never read comics as a child. He has admitted, however, that he used to pretend he was Superman as a child, and has recalled one particular favourite game of his.

"I did have a Superman outfit. I used to play this game with my cousin where he would dress up in civilian clothes – like Clark Kent – and he would stand by the side of the road and when a car came he would run behind a bush and I would come out from the bush dressed as Superman,” he explained.