“When I first met him, he was a pain,” McQueen says. “It was almost like he didn’t want to be [there]. It might have been my own naivete, being a first-time director, not understanding that, more often than not, actors get rejected. And they sometimes only bring a bit of themselves [to an audition] because they get hurt all the time. But with Michael, I thought, ‘What’s he doing here?’ There was almost a cockiness about him. I thought, ‘Okay, thank you very much.’ Then my casting director persuaded me to bring him in the next day, and he was a different person. I thought, ‘Wow, that could be Bobby Sands.’ We met a third time when I actually gave him the role, then I got on the back of his motorcycle and went out for a drink, and that was it. We got on like a house on fire from then on.”
Fassbender dropped more than 30 pounds to play Sands in “Hunger,” which features an excruciating sequence as the character withers away during a hunger strike. “Shame” demanded a similarly all-in physical commitment. “Bobby Sands basically stopped eating to make his body into a weapon,” McQueen says, “and in some way he created his own liberty by doing so. Brandon is on the bang-on opposite side of the situation, in a Western metropolis where he takes in all the freedoms that he wants, but by doing so he imprisons himself.”
The climactic sequence of “Shame,” in which Brandon hits rock-bottom through a series of increasingly impersonal and desperate sexual encounters, wasn’t the most difficult part of the film to shoot, Fassbender says. (“You just have to take off your pants and jump in,” he says, laughing.) Instead, it was a pivotal scene involving Sissy in Brandon’s bathroom. “We weren’t getting it,” McQueen recalls. “We did take after take, and I was getting a bit concerned. I just went upstairs to where he was and said, ‘I don’t know what that was, but that’s not Michael Fassbender.’ And I think that sort of shook him a bit.” What was going wrong? “It has a lot to do with technique, but after a while you have to go beyond that. And that was what Michael was relying on with Carey — a lot of trade and technique. I felt he was holding on to the bar rails, and he had to let go. And then he let go, and it was amazing.”
After “Shame” and “A Dangerous Method,” Fassbender will next be seen in Steven Soderbergh’s mixed-martial-arts action thriller “Haywire,” then Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus,” an untitled Jim Jarmusch vampire film and a third film with McQueen, “Twelve Years a Slave,” with Brad Pitt and Chiwetel Ejiofor. But even in such elevated company on set, he still lives in his longtime East London neighborhood, hangs with his best friend since childhood and stays close to his parents and sister, a neuroscientist in Sacramento. With so much staying the same, what’s changed the most?
“The work,” Fassbender says, without hesitating. “The opportunity to work. I can’t really explain what that means to me, to be working — and with the cream of the crop. . . . I could really sort of care less about fame or the trimmings or whatever else goes around it. I just love doing my job, and I love to work with people who inspire me.”
The interview’s over, and it’s been several minutes since the last yawn. Suddenly, Michael Fassbender is wide awake.
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