Michael Fassbender: actor or movie star?

http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/movies/michael_fassbender_actor_or_movie_050wo9gbigTOwEZRxJGHQP

Michael Fassbender: actor or movie star?
| More Print
3:26 PM, October 6, 2011 ι Kyle Smity

The New York Film Festival is showing Brit director Steve McQueen's dark drama "Shame," about a sex/porno/prostitute addict played by Michael Fassbender, who is a likely Best Actor nominee for this film and is also starring as Carl Jung in the psychotherapy drama "A Dangerous Method," directed by David Cronenberg. I guess we can thank McQueen and Quentin Tarantino for making a star of Fassbender, who has proven adept with Irish, British and American accents and (being half German) even spoke German with an English accent that proved to be his spy character's undoing in "Inglourious Basterds." Fassbender also had the male lead in last spring's "Jane Eyre" and commanded the screen as Young Magneto in this summer's "X-Men: First Class," so this is his year. Watching the cold and clinical "Shame," though, I got the sense that it's going to be tricky for him to get audiences to love him. I think he's going to be like Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Clive Owen, all of whom wowed critics and the industry and quickly won themselves leading-man roles in big movies. All three of them failed as box-office draws, though, and were rapidly chased back into supporting roles, lower-budgeted movies and indies. Fassbender's got a lot of talent, but I don't think he engages with the audience like a movie star. His next big test will be the lead in "Prometheus" for 73-year-old director Ridley Scott, whose career is (in part thanks to the dwindling appeal of his go-to guy Russell Crowe) in free fall. If I were greenlighting big-budget movies I'd be highly disinclined to cast non-Americans in lead roles. Americans don't like foreign leading men.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/michael-fassbenders-destructive-journey/

October 7, 2011, 7:00 am
Michael Fassbender’s Destructive Journey
By MEKADO MURPHY

The director David Cronenberg discusses his film “A Dangerous Method,” starring Michael Fassbender..

The actor Michael Fassbender is enjoying quite a year in his film career. After a Charlotte Brontë-inspired spring and a summer as a superhero turned villain, Mr. Fassbender settles into the fall with two serious films screening at the New York Film Festival. In “A Dangerous Method,” he plays the psychiatrist Carl Jung opposite Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud. And in another psychological drama, “Shame,” he takes on the role of Brandon, a New York man struggling with sex addiction. In this video interview, Mr. Fassbender talks about how he approached his role in “Shame” and how he defined the character.