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
0 comments:
Post a Comment