Wearing
all black was the city-girl cliché. Now old minimalism’s hackneyed
costume is being reshot in more nuanced black and white. Dries Van Noten
cotton trapeze coat, $1,600; Neiman Marcus, Dallas. Givenchy by
Riccardo Tisci gloves and boots.
Photographed by Craig McDean
The utilitarian city wardrobe gets an artistic reimagining (and a dash of 1920s utopia) on model Natalia Vodianova and actor Michael Fassbender.
His office suggests we meet at a place called Violet, deep in the
East End of London. It is a café on a pretty, gentrified street and so
tiny that all of the
batterie de cuisine and kitchen is in plain
sight.
Three women in aprons—including the California-born proprietor,
Claire Ptak (ex–Chez Panisse)—are rolling dough; squidging pink,
pistachio, and lavender frosting onto cupcakes; and filling pies and
sandwiches. It is a scene of charm and domesticity: pretty, womany,
cakey-bakey.
Suddenly the door gusts open on a blast of testosterone, and the
hottest actor in London, wearing jeans, a peacoat, and a wide, toothy
grin, walks two steps, shakes my hand, and orders tea. Everyone’s head
snaps up.
He is so physically arresting (handsome face unshaven, light eyes
dancing) that he sucks all the air out of the room, mesmerizing even the
preschoolers in strollers (whose little, wondering voices fill my
recorder.) He squeezes in beside me, says yes, last night’s BAFTA
ceremony was so much fun; and his laughing, Irish-accented voice rolls
out with Brad and Angelina this and Colin Firth that and Meryl Streep
the other, and how he had missed Judi Dench (whom he venerates), and how
thrilled he was that his friend and collaborator John Maclean won Best
Short Film for
Pitch Black Heist (in which Fassbender did the heisting).
Had he, as was reported, worn, “as part of the Green Carpet Challenge
. . . a custom-made Giorgio Armani sustainable tuxedo made with organic
wool with accents in recycled PET (formerly plastic bottles)”? Most
certainly he had; it was Colin Firth’s wife, Livia, who had asked him if
he wanted to support the project; he likes the Firths (and “Colin is a
bloody brilliant actor”). And what does he wear when he is not on a
green carpet? “I have three pairs of jeans I recycle,” he says, adding
gravely, “My shopping sprees are sporadic and infrequent.” For a man who
is beset in his day job by travail, angst, physical trauma, and
existential despair, he is terrific company; it’s a wider smile in life
than often seen on-screen.
Michael Fassbender is a man in a hurry. Because he had seven lean
years before he was noticed, he is racing to make up time. Having lucked
out (at 24) with a part in the great Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg HBO
miniseries
Band of Brothers (2001), he did mostly British TV and
unremarkable films, until Steve McQueen, the bold British visual artist
turned filmmaker, cast him as Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger-striker and
martyr.
Hunger is an extraordinary piece for which Fassbender
ruthlessly starved himself down, over ten weeks, from 160 pounds to 128
until the arc of his rib cage over his abdomen flattened almost to his
spine in the deathbed scenes. “
Hunger really changed things,” he says. “Filmmakers saw the film, so I was getting into the room earlier, and with bigger directors.”
He always wanted to act (he was head altar boy at his local Catholic
church: good training for the look-at-me trades). He read about the
Method very young and deliberately went to the one drama school in the
British Isles he thought would teach him the Lee Strasberg principles:
the Drama Centre, whose alumni include Firth, Pierce Brosnan, and Simon
Callow.
His voice is as deep and gravelly as Harrison Ford’s, his carriage as
upright and intense as Daniel Day-Lewis’s, the blue/green/gray eyes as
attention-grabbing as Paul Newman’s. The entire roomful of women is Not
Staring and Not Listening so comprehensively, politely (and Englishly),
that I become unhinged and drag him outside to sit in the cold at the
single, solitary pavement table. His tea is brought out to him. No
cakes.
Fassbender’s work rate is relentless. As we meet, he has just completed six movies in 20 months.
Prometheus (Ridley Scott’s
Alien prequel) opens in June. In 2011, you could have seen him in
Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, A Dangerous Method, Shame, and
Haywire. “I loved
Jane Eyre—you
were my favorite Mr. Rochester,” I tell him. He grins and says he’d
liked Toby Stephens but realized eventually that what he wanted for
Rochester was “this bipolar Byronic hero.” He was believable, cold,
vicious, and teasing to Mia Wasikowska’s Jane, such that you accepted
utterly that he was racked to shreds by the horror in the attic and both
excited and repelled by Jane’s youth and righteousness.
Shame,
where he mostly didn’t wear any clothes, was his second go-round with
McQueen and revealed an awful lot of Michael Fassbender, this time not
bony and covered in filth (as in
Hunger) but in bed, in the shower, using the bathroom, under bridges, pressed against a plate-glass window. . . .
Fassbender was born in Heidelberg in 1977 to an Irish mother (Adele)
and a German father (Josef), and moved to Killarney in County Kerry when
he was two. His mother tongue, therefore, is English, and his German
has an English accent. (Which came in useful for
Inglourious Basterds:
a film I reveled in.) So his cradle gift (apart from his staggering
beauty) is an exotic, rather modern, identity: he’s a Republic of
Ireland–bred, German passport–holding, U.K. resident (and taxpayer),
and—above all—a Londoner. He has lived in a one-bedroom flat “across
London Fields” since the 2006 World Cup. “It was Germany versus
Argentina the day I moved in, and I haven’t changed anything about it,”
he says. “I need to fix the whole place, though, because I’ve had leaks
and stuff.” Leaks and stuff? “Yeah, yeah, the roof. ” But isn’t he
making enough money now to— “Fix the damn roof?” Yes, and maybe hire a
hip architectural firm and have them create a fabulous space for him?
“Well, I don’t like to get too carried away,” he says. “A couple of
friends of mine, one’s an architect and one’s an engineer in Dublin,
they’re going to come over and take a look at it.”
He is such a guy. He thinks he was up on a horse for the first time
at six years old. “Yeah. Pretty much, it was like ‘Get up there!’ and
the guy—Willie Joe—hit the arse of the horse and off you go.” If he fell
off, Willie Joe threw him back up and he would cling to the mane. “So I
am actually quite comfortable riding bareback. And riding horses. I
love it; it is one of the most exhilarating things.”
He has a BMW R 1200
GS Adventure, which he rode down the autobahn every morning from
Cologne on his way to the set of
A Dangerous Method. “No speed
limits,” he says, grinning. He rode it to the film festival in Sarajevo,
with his father on a Triumph Tiger. Brad Pitt said, “Your dad drove
with you? He must be some tough son of a bitch.”
He admires Pitt hugely: for his generosity on
Inglourious Basterds, when
Fassbender was nervily feeling like it was a “massive deal to be on a
Tarantino set.” He also admires Plan B Entertainment, Pitt’s production
company, which is backing the third go-round in the McQueen-Fassbender
outings, a movie called
Twelve Years a Slave (in which Pitt has a
role). Projects with Fassbender’s own plan B, Finn McCool Films,
include an epic about the legendary Ulster hero, Cuchulainn.
But what women really want from Michael Fassbender’s gigantic talent
and terrific looks is a little less art house/indie, fewer
robots/mutants/warriors, and more big, swoony, fabulous love stories. So
what’s engaging me the most is coming up from a very exciting director,
Gerardo Naranjo (who made
Miss Bala), and will be his major studio debut, adapted from Charles Martin’s 2010 novel
The Mountain Between Us (even the title sounds made for Fassbender, no?).
The man himself has stuff to do, people to see. “Working with writers
is what I really enjoy.
Associating myself with great writers and
trying to find them. Actually, I am going to meet one now,” he says.
“Got to meet him at the South Bank. Oh, shite—at three o’clock. Whaddya
think—20 minutes? Half an hour?” Me: On your bike? Easy. And off he
shoots
