Michael Fassbender

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#9,991
From Vulture. It's sweet how much he cares about Fassbender.
We talked about his first encounter with Fassbender, when he’d come in to read for the part of Sands, in London. It went fine, but neither Fassbender nor McQueen seemed to know quite how much was appropriate for Fassbender to give in an audition. McQueen invited him back a second time. “And it was just amazing,” McQueen said. After offering him the part, McQueen climbed aboard Fassbender’s motorcycle, zooming to Fassbender’s friend’s bar, near Leicester Square. “I’d never been on a ****ing motorcycle before,” McQueen recalled, laughing. “We got drunk and had a good laugh. We just immediately bonded.” I wondered what that bond was about. McQueen struggled. He began choking up. “I just love him,” he said. “You know when you’ve got someone and they understand you and you understand them? It’s like love—you don’t choose it. Someone comes into that world with you and you each raise your game. It’s wonderful. It’s a rare thing.”
Click to expand...
 
#9,993
Welcome to the A-List, Michael Fassbender

With two marquee films this season he's officially hit the big time. By Vicky Dearden and Matt BergImagine a continuum of leading men. On one end the Actor’s Actors—the men who, while famous, are known more for their chops than their populist appeal: your Sean Penns, your Daniel Day-Lewises and—up until the ’90s, anyhow—your DeNiros and Pacinos. On the other end of this gamut you have your Franchise Players—they can act, but their main strengths are their charisma and recognizability. Will Smith, Tom Cruise, those guys. The truth is, to some degree every actor wants to occupy space at both ends of the spectrum. It’s why a guy like Brad Pitt will interrupt his stream of small pictures to run around shooting zombies on a global scale. Then, you have actors who are more inscrutable. It’s like they genuinely don’t care where you’d place them. Like they don’t care about Hollywood’s restless need to categorize them. Like, at all.
Michael Fassbender just might be the poster boy for these impossible-to-pin-down actors. He’s charismatic as hell, and attractive to boot. He’s currently starring in one of the biggest superhero franchises in recent memory (he’ll be reprising his role as Magneto, the all-too-sympathetic villain, in this spring’s X-Men: Days of Future Past); meanwhile, he’s getting Oscar buzz for his disturbing turn as a ruthless slave owner in 12 Years a Slave. Then, there’s The Counselor, penned by Cormac McCarthy and directed by Ridley Scott, which falls somewhere in the middle.
His whole career has been like that. You want a “for instance?” When he teamed up with Scott the first time for the sci-fi behemoth Prometheus, everyone was sure he’d be the Next Big Thing. Then, the film came out and… It wasn’t that he wasn’t good. His performance as a morally ambiguous android was nuanced and, actually, kind of amazing. It’s that it was too nuanced. Actors looking to be Franchise Players don’t go in for roles that cold and, well, actorly.
So, where does that leave Mr. Fassbender? It’s funny because, with a lot of actors, you hear talk about whether or not they’re ready for stardom—can they pull off marquis status. In Fassbender’s case, it’s almost as if the opposite is true. You can’t help but wonder if we’re ready for him. – GH
 
#9,994
Fassbender on Fassbender
An essay examining the rise of the Irish Prometheus star, annotated by the man himself. By Sharp Staff
Michael Fassbender eludes easy categorization. We know he’s an actor—a fine and versatile one, who since his breakout role as Bobby Sands in Hunger (2008) has become practically inescapable. In the past three years, we’ve seen him as Lt. Archie Hicox in Inglourious Basterds (2009), Connor in Fish Tank (2009), Rochester in Jane Eyre (2011), Magneto in X-Men: First Class (2011), and Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method (2011). In 2011 alone, Fassbender starred in six films, including one summer blockbuster and one NC-17 scandal. By any reasonable standard, this range of performances should qualify him for household-name status.
And yet, it was not until Shame (2011), director Steve McQueen’s sex-addiction drama, that we actually began to recognize the man’s face. This isn’t a slam. If anything, it’s a compliment. No two Fassbender performances have been alike. Normally we can depend on a certain consistency in even our more talented movie stars: Brad Pitt and George Clooney have their swagger, Robert Downey Jr. has his smirk, and Johnny Depp has his tics and funny hats. Michael Fassbender has none of these. A chameleon isn’t supposed to have a defining characteristic.
As an actor, Fassbender has yet to be nailed down. The repressed Carl Jung, Shame’s alienated Brandon, the villainous Magneto, the cartoonish Lt. Hicox… these performances have already established him as one of the best actors of his generation, and he now seems on the edge of superstardom.
If “Michael Fassbender, Star” has a distinctive trait, it’s his laugh. He opens his mouth wide and the top half of his head seems to bend backwards, erupting in a big, perfect cackle. It’s the kind of laugh that makes every joke feel like the funniest joke in the world.


As his movies become bigger and his profile rises, Fassbender has finally been forced to enter the realm of “celebrity,” an altogether different job than “actor.” The superstars have it easy. In movie after movie, they’ve honed distinctive onscreen personas they can transfer onto the talk show circuit with relative ease. We can expect Pitt to be a pretty-boy on Leno, or Depp to be a quirky misfit on Letterman, or Downey to be a wiseass with Kimmel.


He looks great in any setting, with the cheekbones of a pretty-boy and the jaw of He-Man (the best of both worlds). He’s striking in a tux, regal in a uniform, fit in a tracksuit and, you can’t help but notice, rock-solid in the nude.88. “I try and keep somewhat fit. Usually it’s just mainly cardio stuff, like jump rope, using my own body weight as opposed to weights. Heavy bag, focus mitts, pretty much boxing-related exercise.” On red carpets, he looks so ******* perfect you almost want to punch him, but then he’ll give another pearly white laugh and you’re back in his thrall.
Shame sent Fassbender for his first tour of duty in that annual movie-star ritual, awards season.99. “It’s great that you’re in that category because [people say], ‘Oh, I thought this film was NC-17 and dirty,’ but then you get the awards behind it, then people go, ‘Well, maybe I should check it out.’ That’s the great thing about the awards.”11. “You start off at the beginning like, ‘This doesn’t mean anything, it’s a joke, keep it light, the work is the work.’ But it starts to sort of seep into you, and so then when I found out that I wasn’t nominated, of course I was upset. But again, that’s my ego and my vanities. So you sort of go, ‘Well, this is okay, you’ve got to keep that under control anyway,’ and then you move on.”10. “I try not to take the awards too seriously because it is such a subjective medium. It’s not like sports where somebody either crosses the finishing line first, or wins in a point system or whatever else.” In award show after award show, the jokes were the same. Fassbender received a Golden Globe nomination and the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival, but no Oscar recognition.10 In January, after the nominations were announced, the LA Times ran an article with the cheeky headline, “Did Michael Fassbender’s big part cost him a nomination?” It quoted a “high-ranking academy voter” who said, “He’s a guy who’s unfamiliar to a lot of people and did a movie that’s really intimate. That was a super-brave performance but…perhaps it inspired people to fantasize, and not actually vote.”11
Of course, Fassbender is a Serious Actor, and so was less concerned with nudity than with Serious Actor Stuff. Ask him about his nude scenes, 12. “They were probably the easiest things to do in both those films, Hunger and Shame. The other stuff is just trying to bare your soul and try and find the depths of the characters and try and serve the character as best as possible—that’s the tricky stuff.”and he gives the perfect answer—about how the nude scenes are the easy part, and the hard part is depicting raw emotions, etcetera, etcetera.12 But while Fassbender has been widely praised for his wounded, unnerving performance as a yuppie-by-day/sex-addict-by-night, the jokes about the size of his organ have tended to dominate conversation. In Hunger and A Dangerous Method, he plays historical figures and undergoes physical transformation; in Shame, the line between Brandon and Fassbender is disturbingly ambiguous.
We can tolerate it when actors bare themselves so thoroughly, but we can’t tolerate the same from our stars. If we are to accept Fassbender as a star, we need to know he’s stable and consistent, like Clooney or Pitt or Depp—they can add weight, drop accents, have interesting facial hair, but that’s as far as we let them go. We need to know that he’s not Brandon Sullivan, and that was just an act. We need to know that he’s really the charming fellow we’ve seen laughing it up on Letterman.13. “You’ve got somebody like Ridley Scott, obviously a master director, and then you’ve got this character to play, so you want to make sure that you’re serving the story, you are serving the director, you’re serving the other actors, and that you’re bringing something interesting, that’s it’s not one-dimensional, two-dimensional, all the things which are the other acting problems.”14. “I think that most of us are relatively good people and do good things, but we also have done things that aren’t so positive. So it’s just more interesting, as a viewer going to the cinema, to be somewhat active in the experiences as opposed to just putting popcorn in my mouth and sort of going through the motions.”
Oddly enough, it was A Bear Named Winnie (2004), a pre-fame obscurity in which he played the kindly, wisecracking Canadian soldier who rescued the bear who became Winnie the Pooh. In both Prometheus and A Bear Named Winnie, Fassbender gives performances as smooth and opaque as “Michael Fassbender, Star.”14
But, please no. We don’t want that. We want Fassbender to be a great actor, not a great celebrity. We don’t want him to have to maintain the big, clattering machine of celebrity by feeding it with populist junk, like Johnny Depp has been doing with his Pirates sequels.15 We want him to keep taking risks—to keep courting alienation with punishing roles. Maybe it’s for the best that he didn’t win an Oscar for Shame. Look at all the recent Oscar winners who followed their wins with disposable garbage—Forest Whitaker (Vantage Point), Jamie Foxx (Stealth), Christoph Waltz (The Green Hornet), Adrien Brody (The Village).
Stardom is where great actors go when they retire, and we want Fassbender to keep us on edge. We like Fassbender when he’s a suave red-carpet fixture, but we like him even better when we can’t recognize him.
 
#9,996
Allegory said:
Fassbender on Fassbender
An essay examining the rise of the Irish Prometheus star, annotated by the man himself. By Sharp Staff
Michael Fassbender eludes easy categorization. We know he’s an actor—a fine and versatile one, who since his breakout role as Bobby Sands in Hunger (2008) has become practically inescapable. In the past three years, we’ve seen him as Lt. Archie Hicox in Inglourious Basterds (2009), Connor in Fish Tank (2009), Rochester in Jane Eyre (2011), Magneto in X-Men: First Class (2011), and Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method (2011). In 2011 alone, Fassbender starred in six films, including one summer blockbuster and one NC-17 scandal. By any reasonable standard, this range of performances should qualify him for household-name status.
And yet, it was not until Shame (2011), director Steve McQueen’s sex-addiction drama, that we actually began to recognize the man’s face. This isn’t a slam. If anything, it’s a compliment. No two Fassbender performances have been alike. Normally we can depend on a certain consistency in even our more talented movie stars: Brad Pitt and George Clooney have their swagger, Robert Downey Jr. has his smirk, and Johnny Depp has his tics and funny hats. Michael Fassbender has none of these. A chameleon isn’t supposed to have a defining characteristic.
As an actor, Fassbender has yet to be nailed down. The repressed Carl Jung, Shame’s alienated Brandon, the villainous Magneto, the cartoonish Lt. Hicox… these performances have already established him as one of the best actors of his generation, and he now seems on the edge of superstardom.
If “Michael Fassbender, Star” has a distinctive trait, it’s his laugh. He opens his mouth wide and the top half of his head seems to bend backwards, erupting in a big, perfect cackle. It’s the kind of laugh that makes every joke feel like the funniest joke in the world.


As his movies become bigger and his profile rises, Fassbender has finally been forced to enter the realm of “celebrity,” an altogether different job than “actor.” The superstars have it easy. In movie after movie, they’ve honed distinctive onscreen personas they can transfer onto the talk show circuit with relative ease. We can expect Pitt to be a pretty-boy on Leno, or Depp to be a quirky misfit on Letterman, or Downey to be a wiseass with Kimmel.


He looks great in any setting, with the cheekbones of a pretty-boy and the jaw of He-Man (the best of both worlds). He’s striking in a tux, regal in a uniform, fit in a tracksuit and, you can’t help but notice, rock-solid in the nude.88. “I try and keep somewhat fit. Usually it’s just mainly cardio stuff, like jump rope, using my own body weight as opposed to weights. Heavy bag, focus mitts, pretty much boxing-related exercise.” On red carpets, he looks so ******* perfect you almost want to punch him, but then he’ll give another pearly white laugh and you’re back in his thrall.
Shame sent Fassbender for his first tour of duty in that annual movie-star ritual, awards season.99. “It’s great that you’re in that category because [people say], ‘Oh, I thought this film was NC-17 and dirty,’ but then you get the awards behind it, then people go, ‘Well, maybe I should check it out.’ That’s the great thing about the awards.”11. “You start off at the beginning like, ‘This doesn’t mean anything, it’s a joke, keep it light, the work is the work.’ But it starts to sort of seep into you, and so then when I found out that I wasn’t nominated, of course I was upset. But again, that’s my ego and my vanities. So you sort of go, ‘Well, this is okay, you’ve got to keep that under control anyway,’ and then you move on.”10. “I try not to take the awards too seriously because it is such a subjective medium. It’s not like sports where somebody either crosses the finishing line first, or wins in a point system or whatever else.” In award show after award show, the jokes were the same. Fassbender received a Golden Globe nomination and the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival, but no Oscar recognition.10 In January, after the nominations were announced, the LA Times ran an article with the cheeky headline, “Did Michael Fassbender’s big part cost him a nomination?” It quoted a “high-ranking academy voter” who said, “He’s a guy who’s unfamiliar to a lot of people and did a movie that’s really intimate. That was a super-brave performance but…perhaps it inspired people to fantasize, and not actually vote.”11
Of course, Fassbender is a Serious Actor, and so was less concerned with nudity than with Serious Actor Stuff. Ask him about his nude scenes, 12. “They were probably the easiest things to do in both those films, Hunger and Shame. The other stuff is just trying to bare your soul and try and find the depths of the characters and try and serve the character as best as possible—that’s the tricky stuff.”and he gives the perfect answer—about how the nude scenes are the easy part, and the hard part is depicting raw emotions, etcetera, etcetera.12 But while Fassbender has been widely praised for his wounded, unnerving performance as a yuppie-by-day/sex-addict-by-night, the jokes about the size of his organ have tended to dominate conversation. In Hunger and A Dangerous Method, he plays historical figures and undergoes physical transformation; in Shame, the line between Brandon and Fassbender is disturbingly ambiguous.
We can tolerate it when actors bare themselves so thoroughly, but we can’t tolerate the same from our stars. If we are to accept Fassbender as a star, we need to know he’s stable and consistent, like Clooney or Pitt or Depp—they can add weight, drop accents, have interesting facial hair, but that’s as far as we let them go. We need to know that he’s not Brandon Sullivan, and that was just an act. We need to know that he’s really the charming fellow we’ve seen laughing it up on Letterman.13. “You’ve got somebody like Ridley Scott, obviously a master director, and then you’ve got this character to play, so you want to make sure that you’re serving the story, you are serving the director, you’re serving the other actors, and that you’re bringing something interesting, that’s it’s not one-dimensional, two-dimensional, all the things which are the other acting problems.”14. “I think that most of us are relatively good people and do good things, but we also have done things that aren’t so positive. So it’s just more interesting, as a viewer going to the cinema, to be somewhat active in the experiences as opposed to just putting popcorn in my mouth and sort of going through the motions.”
Oddly enough, it was A Bear Named Winnie (2004), a pre-fame obscurity in which he played the kindly, wisecracking Canadian soldier who rescued the bear who became Winnie the Pooh. In both Prometheus and A Bear Named Winnie, Fassbender gives performances as smooth and opaque as “Michael Fassbender, Star.”14
But, please no. We don’t want that. We want Fassbender to be a great actor, not a great celebrity. We don’t want him to have to maintain the big, clattering machine of celebrity by feeding it with populist junk, like Johnny Depp has been doing with his Pirates sequels.15 We want him to keep taking risks—to keep courting alienation with punishing roles. Maybe it’s for the best that he didn’t win an Oscar for Shame. Look at all the recent Oscar winners who followed their wins with disposable garbage—Forest Whitaker (Vantage Point), Jamie Foxx (Stealth), Christoph Waltz (The Green Hornet), Adrien Brody (The Village).
Stardom is where great actors go when they retire, and we want Fassbender to keep us on edge. We like Fassbender when he’s a suave red-carpet fixture, but we like him even better when we can’t recognize him.
Click to expand...

Yes, agree on the last paragraph, would be great that on the long run he goes down the Gary Oldman route, i.e. an actor's actor.
 
#9,998
Allegory said:
Welcome to the A-List, Michael Fassbender

With two marquee films this season he's officially hit the big time. By Vicky Dearden and Matt BergImagine a continuum of leading men. On one end the Actor’s Actors—the men who, while famous, are known more for their chops than their populist appeal: your Sean Penns, your Daniel Day-Lewises and—up until the ’90s, anyhow—your DeNiros and Pacinos. On the other end of this gamut you have your Franchise Players—they can act, but their main strengths are their charisma and recognizability. Will Smith, Tom Cruise, those guys. The truth is, to some degree every actor wants to occupy space at both ends of the spectrum. It’s why a guy like Brad Pitt will interrupt his stream of small pictures to run around shooting zombies on a global scale. Then, you have actors who are more inscrutable. It’s like they genuinely don’t care where you’d place them. Like they don’t care about Hollywood’s restless need to categorize them. Like, at all.
Michael Fassbender just might be the poster boy for these impossible-to-pin-down actors. He’s charismatic as hell, and attractive to boot. He’s currently starring in one of the biggest superhero franchises in recent memory (he’ll be reprising his role as Magneto, the all-too-sympathetic villain, in this spring’s X-Men: Days of Future Past); meanwhile, he’s getting Oscar buzz for his disturbing turn as a ruthless slave owner in 12 Years a Slave. Then, there’s The Counselor, penned by Cormac McCarthy and directed by Ridley Scott, which falls somewhere in the middle.
His whole career has been like that. You want a “for instance?” When he teamed up with Scott the first time for the sci-fi behemoth Prometheus, everyone was sure he’d be the Next Big Thing. Then, the film came out and… It wasn’t that he wasn’t good. His performance as a morally ambiguous android was nuanced and, actually, kind of amazing. It’s that it was too nuanced. Actors looking to be Franchise Players don’t go in for roles that cold and, well, actorly.
So, where does that leave Mr. Fassbender? It’s funny because, with a lot of actors, you hear talk about whether or not they’re ready for stardom—can they pull off marquis status. In Fassbender’s case, it’s almost as if the opposite is true. You can’t help but wonder if we’re ready for him. – GH
Click to expand...

So far he's still flirting with the A-list zone, but not quite there yet.
 
#9,999
SAG nods

20th ANNUAL SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARDS NOMINATIONS

THEATRICAL MOTION PICTURES
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role
BRUCE DERN / Woody Grant – “NEBRASKA” (Paramount Pictures)
CHIWETEL EJIOFOR / Solomon Northup – “12 YEARS A SLAVE” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
TOM HANKS / Capt. Richard Phillips – “CAPTAIN PHILLIPS” (Columbia Pictures)
MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY / Ron Woodroof – “DALLAS BUYERS CLUB” (Focus Features)
FOREST WHITAKER / Cecil Gaines – “LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER” (The Weinstein Company)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
CATE BLANCHETT / Jasmine – “BLUE JASMINE” (Sony Pictures Classics)
SANDRA BULLOCK / Ryan Stone – “GRAVITY” (Warner Bros. Pictures)
JUDI DENCH / Philomena Lee – “PHILOMENA” (The Weinstein Company)
MERYL STREEP / Violet Weston – “AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY” (The Weinstein Company)
EMMA THOMPSON / P.L. Travers – “SAVING MR. BANKS” (Walt Disney Pictures)

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role
BARKHAD ABDI / Muse – “CAPTAIN PHILLIPS” (Columbia Pictures)
DANIEL BRÜHL / Niki Lauda – “RUSH” (Universal Pictures)
MICHAEL FASSBENDER / Edwin Epps – “12 YEARS A SLAVE” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
JAMES GANDOLFINI / Albert – “ENOUGH SAID” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
JARED LETO / Rayon – “DALLAS BUYERS CLUB” (Focus Features)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role
JENNIFER LAWRENCE / Rosalyn Rosenfeld – “AMERICAN HUSTLE” (Columbia Pictures)
LUPITA NYONG’O / Patsey – “12 YEARS A SLAVE” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
JULIA ROBERTS / Barbara Weston – “AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY” (The Weinstein Company)
JUNE SQUIBB / Kate Grant – “NEBRASKA” (Paramount Pictures)
OPRAH WINFREY / Gloria Gaines – “LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER” (The Weinstein Company)

Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
12 YEARS A SLAVE (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
AMERICAN HUSTLE (Columbia Pictures)
AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY (The Weinstein Company)
DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (Focus Features)
LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER (The Weinstein Company)

Fingers crossed! :smile1:
 
#10,002
LeeLooDallasMP said:
My mother saw the list, she was quite bitter she said "Urgh fine 12YAS, but only four-five people of colour for films and only three for TV, yipee yay...really???" welp....
Click to expand...
Reminds of this time I was working at a studio and everyone who was Jewish (or pretending to be Jewish) was off for a holiday and there were 4 asian people and 5 black people left on my floor. We just had to laugh at the lack of diversity.
 
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